Users Personalized Sketch-Based Image Retrieval Using Deep Transfer Learning

Traditionally, sketch-based image retrieval is mostly based on human-defined features for similarity calculation and matching. The retrieval results are generally similar in contour and lack complete semantic information of the image. Simultaneously, due to the inherent ambiguity of hand-drawn images, there is “one-to-many” category mapping relationship between hand-drawn and natural images. To accurately improve the fine-grained retrieval results, we first train a SBIR general model. Based on the two-branch full-shared parameters architecture, we innovatively propose a deep full convolutional neural network structure model, which obtains mean average precision (MAP) 0.64 on the Flickr15K dataset. On the basis of the general model, we combine the user history feedback image with the input hand-drawn image as input, and use the transfer learning idea to finetune the distribution of features in vector space so that the neural network can achieve fine-grained image feature learning. This is the first time that we propose to solve the problem of personalization in the field of sketch retrieval by the idea of transfer learning. After the model migration, we can achieve fine-grained image feature learning to meet the personalized needs of the user’s sketches.