Sketch and Text Synergy: Fusing Structural Contours and Descriptive Attributes for Fine-Grained Image Retrieval
For researchers in cross-modal retrieval, this work addresses the complementary nature of sketch and text modalities, enabling more accurate fine-grained image retrieval.
The paper tackles fine-grained image retrieval using both hand-drawn sketches and text descriptions, proposing the STBIR framework that fuses structural contours from sketches with color/texture cues from text. The method achieves superior performance over state-of-the-art methods on a new benchmark dataset.
Fine-grained image retrieval via hand-drawn sketches or textual descriptions remains a critical challenge due to inherent modality gaps. While hand-drawn sketches capture complex structural contours, they lack color and texture, which text effectively provides despite omitting spatial contours. Motivated by the complementary nature of these modalities, we propose the Sketch and Text Based Image Retrieval (STBIR) framework. By synergizing the rich color and texture cues from text with the structural outlines provided by sketches, STBIR achieves superior fine-grained retrieval performance. First, a curriculum learning driven robustness enhancement module is proposed to enhance the model's robustness when handling queries of varying quality. Second, we introduce a category-knowledge-based feature space optimization module, thereby significantly boosting the model's representational power. Finally, we design a multi-stage cross-modal feature alignment mechanism to effectively mitigate the challenges of cross modal feature alignment. Furthermore, we curate the fine-grained STBIR benchmark dataset to rigorously validate the efficacy of our proposed framework and to provide data support as a reference for subsequent related research. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed STBIR framework significantly outperforms state of the art methods.