Category-Epitomes : Discriminatively Minimalist Representations for Object Categories
This work provides a novel viewpoint for studying the semantic nature of object categories through sketches, which could benefit fields like computer vision and cognitive science, though it appears incremental in its approach.
The authors tackled the problem of representing object categories using freehand sketches by analyzing them as sequences of drawing strokes, resulting in the creation of sparse and discriminative representations called category-epitomes and a measure called epitome-score to quantify sparseness.
Freehand line sketches are an interesting and unique form of visual representation. Typically, such sketches are studied and utilized as an end product of the sketching process. However, we have found it instructive to study the sketches as sequentially accumulated composition of drawing strokes added over time. Studying sketches in this manner has enabled us to create novel sparse yet discriminative sketch-based representations for object categories which we term category-epitomes. Our procedure for obtaining these epitomes concurrently provides a natural measure for quantifying the sparseness underlying the original sketch, which we term epitome-score. We construct and analyze category-epitomes and epitome-scores for freehand sketches belonging to various object categories. Our analysis provides a novel viewpoint for studying the semantic nature of object categories.