Eye of the Dragon: Exploring Discriminatively Minimalist Sketch-based Abstractions for Object Categories

As a form of visual representation, freehand line sketches are typically studied as an end product of the sketching process. However, from a recognition point of view, one can also study various orderings and properties of the primitive strokes that compose the sketch. Studying sketches in this manner has enabled us to create novel sparse yet discriminative sketch-based representations for object categories which we term category-epitomes. Concurrently, the epitome construction provides a natural measure for quantifying the sparseness underlying the original sketch, which we term epitome-score. We analyze category-epitomes and epitomescores for hand-drawn sketches from a sketch dataset of 160 object categories commonly encountered in daily life. Our analysis provides a novel viewpoint for examining the complexity of representation for visual object categories