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arXiv · 2509.06566

Back To The Drawing Board: Rethinking Scene-Level Sketch-Based Image Retrieval

Emil Demić·Luka Čehovin Zajc
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Abstract

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.

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Emil Demić, Luka Čehovin Zajc. 2025-09-08. Back To The Drawing Board: Rethinking Scene-Level Sketch-Based Image Retrieval. https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.06566

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