Sketch-Based Retrieval Approach Using Artificial Intelligence Algorithms for Deep Vision Feature Extraction
Authors: Sabry Eman S. , Elagooz Salah , El-Samie Fathi E. Abd , El-Shafai Walid , El-Bahnasawy Nirmeen A. , El-Banby Ghada , Soliman Naglaa F. , Sengan Sudhakar , Ramadan Rabie A. 
Published: November 2022

Since the onset of civilization, sketches have been used to portray our visual world, and they continue to do so in many different disciplines today. As in specific government agencies, establishing similarities between sketches is a crucial aspect of gathering forensic evidence in crimes, in addition to satisfying the user’s subjective requirements in searching and browsing for specific sorts of images (i.e., clip art images), especially with the proliferation of smartphones with touchscreens. With such a kind of search, quickly and effectively drawing and retrieving sketches from databases can occasionally be challenging, when using keywords or categories. Drawing some simple forms and searching for the image in that way could be simpler in some situations than attempting to put the vision into words, which is not always possible. Modern techniques, such as Content-Based Image Retrieval (CBIR), may offer a more useful solution. The key engine of such techniques that poses various challenges might be dealt with using effective visual feature representation. Object edge feature detectors are commonly used to extract features from different image sorts. However, they are inconvenient as they consume time due to their complexity in computation. In addition, they are complicated to implement with real-time responses. Therefore, assessing and identifying alternative solutions from the vast array of methods is essential. Scale Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT) is a typical solution that has been used by most prevalent research studies. Even for learning-based methods, SIFT is frequently used for comparison and assessment. However, SIFT has several downsides. Hence, this research is directed to the utilization of handcrafted-feature-based Oriented FAST and Rotated BRIEF (ORB) to capture visual features of sketched images to overcome SIFT limitations on small datasets. However, handcrafted-feature-based algorithms are generally unsuitable for large-scale sets of images. Efficient sketched image retrieval is achieved based on content and separation of the features of the black line drawings from the background into precisely-defined variables. Each variable is encoded as a distinct dimension in this disentangled representation. For representation of sketched images, this paper presents a Sketch-Based Image Retrieval (SBIR) system, which uses the information-maximizing GAN (InfoGAN) model. The establishment of such a retrieval system is based on features acquired by the unsupervised learning InfoGAN model to satisfy users’ expectations for large-scale datasets. The challenges with the matching and retrieval systems of such kinds of images develop when drawing clarity declines. Finally, the ORB-based matching system is introduced and compared to the SIFT-based system. Additionally, the InfoGAN-based system is compared with state-of-the-art solutions, including SIFT, ORB, and Convolutional Neural Network (CNN).