Sketch Less Face Image Retrieval: A New Challenge
This addresses the challenge of time and skill required for complete face sketches in forensic or security applications, though it is incremental as it builds on existing retrieval techniques.
The paper tackles the problem of identifying a person from a partial face sketch by proposing a new task called sketch less face image retrieval (SLFIR), which aims to retrieve target face photos using as few strokes as possible, and introduces a two-stage baseline method that achieves retrieval with incomplete sketches.
In some specific scenarios, face sketch was used to identify a person. However, drawing a complete face sketch often needs skills and takes time, which hinder its widespread applicability in the practice. In this study, we proposed a new task named sketch less face image retrieval (SLFIR), in which the retrieval was carried out at each stroke and aim to retrieve the target face photo using a partial sketch with as few strokes as possible (see Fig.1). Firstly, we developed a method to generate the data of sketch with drawing process, and opened such dataset; Secondly, we proposed a two-stage method as the baseline for SLFIR that (1) A triplet network, was first adopt to learn the joint embedding space shared between the complete sketch and its target face photo; (2) Regarding the sketch drawing episode as a sequence, we designed a LSTM module to optimize the representation of the incomplete face sketch. Experiments indicate that the new framework can finish the retrieval using a partial or pool drawing sketch.