Training Convolutional Neural Network for Sketch Recognition on Large-Scale Dataset

With the rapid development of computer vision technology, increasingly more focus has been put on image recognition. More specifically, a sketch is an important hand-drawn image that is garnering increased attention. Moreover, as handheld devices such as tablets, smartphones, etc. have become more popular, it has become increasingly more convenient for people to hand-draw sketches using this equipment. Hence, sketch recognition is a necessary task to improve the performance of intelligent equipment. In this paper, a sketch recognition learning approach is proposed that is based on the Visual Geometry Group16 Convolutional Neural Network (VGG16 CNN). In particular, in order to diminish the effect of the number of sketches on the learning method, we adopt a strategy of increasing the quantity to improve the diversity and scale of sketches. Initially, sketch features are extracted via the pretrained VGG16 CNN. Additionally, we obtain contextual features based on the traverse stroke scheme. Then, the VGG16 CNN is trained using a joint Bayesian method to update the related network parameters. Moreover, this network has been applied to predict the labels of input sketches in order to automatically recognize the label of a sketch. Last but not least, related experiments are conducted, and the comparison of our method with the state-of-the-art methods is performed, which shows that our approach is superior and feasible.