Free Hand-Drawn Sketch Segmentation

In this paper, we study the problem of how to segment a
freehand sketch at the object level. By carefully considering the basic
principles of human perceptual organization, a real-time solution is presented
to automatically segment a user’s sketch during his/her drawing.
First, a graph-based sketch segmentation algorithm is proposed to segment
a cluttered sketch into multiple parts based on the factor of prox-
imity. Then, to improve the ability of detecting semantically meaningful
objects, a semantic-based approach is introduced to simulate the past
experience in the perceptual system by leveraging a web-scale clipart
database. Finally, other important factors learnt from past experience,
such as similarity, symmetry, direction, and closure, are also taken into
account to make the approach more robust and practical. The proposed
sketch segmentation framework has ability to handle complex sketches
with overlapped objects. Extensive experimental results show the effectiveness
of the proposed framework and algorithms.