Sketch Based Image Retrieval with Conditional Generative Adversarial Network

Traditional methods on sketch based image retrieval leveraged edge detection algorithms to turn natural images into edge maps, but it can not well decrease the visual diversity between natural images and sketches. For this problem, we propose a novel sketch based image retrieval method based on conditional generative adversarial networks. Our method is demonstrated as follows: Firstly, we train the conditional generative adversarial networks, of which the generative network is constituted by an edges-to-photo mapping network; secondly, sketch images are converted to natural images by the generative network; thirdly, we use deep convolution neural network to extract the deep feature to achieve retrieval. Experiments on retrieval show positive results.