Teaching GANs to sketch in vector format

Sketching is a fundamental human cognitive ability. Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have achieved the state-of-the-art performance in recognition tasks like image recognition, speech recognition etc. but have not made significant progress in generating stroke-based sketches a.k.a sketches in vector format. Though there are Variational Auto Encoders (VAEs) for generating sketches in vector format, there is no Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) architecture for the same. In this paper, we propose a standalone GAN architecture called SkeGAN and a hybrid VAE-GAN architecture called VASkeGAN, for sketch generation in vector format. SkeGAN is a stochastic policy in Reinforcement Learning (RL), capable of generating both multidimensional continuous and discrete outputs. VASkeGAN draws sketches by coupling the efficient representation of data by VAE with the powerful generating capabilities of GAN. We have validated that SkeGAN and VASkeGAN generate visually appealing sketches with minimal scribble effect and is comparable to a recent work titled Sketch-RNN. © 2021 ACM