Active sketch for finding primary structures in images

Abstract

The vision system of human beings is very sensitive to lines. Sketches composed of line drawings provide a useful representation for image structures, which can be used for recognition and which is capable of serving as intermediate data structures of images for further analysis. However, traditional schemes tackling the line detection problem for sketch generation are stuck to one of the two problems: lack of global supervision for line detection over an image or confinement of hard global constraints on the configuration of detected lines. In this paper, we propose an active sketch model for finding primary structures in the form of line drawings, overcoming shortcomings of the traditional schemes by combining local line finding techniques with supervision of a global saliency measure while imposing no global constraint on the configuration of the line drawings. Test results show that our model is able to sketch out lines in an image representing the most salient image discontinuity without imposing any shape or topology constraint on the sketch. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.