2025/09/08 by Emil Demić, Luka Čehovin Zajc, Demić, Emil +1
Computer Science · #Advanced Image and Video Retrieval Techniques #Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Image Retrieval and Classification Techniques #Multimodal Machine Learning Applications
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2509.06566
openalex publication_date 2025/09/08 · openalex created_date 2025/10/11 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
The goal of Scene-level Sketch-Based Image Retrieval is to retrieve natural images matching the overall semantics and spatial layout of a free-hand sketch. Unlike prior work focused on architectural augmentations of retrieval models, we emphasize the inherent ambiguity and noise present in real-world sketches. This insight motivates a training objective that is explicitly designed to be robust to sketch variability. We show that with an appropriate combination of pre-training, encoder architecture, and loss formulation, it is possible to achieve state-of-the-art performance without the introduction of additional complexity. Extensive experiments on a challenging FS-COCO and widely-used SketchyCOCO datasets confirm the effectiveness of our approach and underline the critical role of training design in cross-modal retrieval tasks, as well as the need to improve the evaluation scenarios of scene-level SBIR.