Cousin network guided sketch recognition via latent attribute warehouse

We study the problem of sketch image recognition. This problem is plagued with two major challenges: 1) sketch images are often scarce in contrast to the abundance of natural images, rendering the training task difficult, and 2) the significant domain gap between sketch image and its natural image counterpart makes the task of bridging the two domains challenging. In order to overcome these challenges, in this paper we propose to transfer the knowledge of a network learned from natural images to a sketch network - a new deep net architecture which we term as cousin network. This network guides a sketch-recognition network to extract more relevant features that are close to those of natural images, via adversarial training. Moreover, to enhance the transfer ability of the classification model, a sketch-to-image attribute warehouse is constructed to approximate the transformation between the sketch domain and the real image domain. Extensive experiments conducted on the TU-Berlin dataset show that the proposed model is able to efficiently distill knowledge from natural images and achieves superior performance than the current state of the art.