Sketch Based Image Retrieval for Architecture Images with Siamese Swin Transformer

Sketch-based image retrieval (SBIR) is an image retrieval task that takes a sketch as input and outputs colour images matching the sketch. Most recent SBIR methods utilise deep learning methods with complicated network designs, which are resource-intensive for practical use. This paper proposes a novel compact framework that takes the siamese network with image view angle information, targeting the SBIR task for architecture images. In particular, the proposed siamese network engages a compact SwinTiny transformer as the backbone encoder. View angle information of the architecture image is fed to the model to further improve search accuracy. To cope with the insufficient sketches issue, simulated building sketches are used in training, which are generated by a pre-trained edge extractor. Experiments show that our model achieves 0.859 top-one accuracy exceeding many baseline models for an architecture retrieval task.