Project Descriptions

Sketch-based image search is a well-known problem difficult to solve. Little progress has been made in the past decade in developing a large-scale, practical, sketch-based search engine. We have revisited this problem and developed a scalable solution. Based on this solution, we have built a system called MindFinder that indexes more than 2 million web images, enabling efficient, sketch-based image retrieval. MindFinder enables users to sketch major curves of a target image as a query. Based on these sketches, relevant images can be returned in real time. The system also supports the addition of semantic tags and colors to enhance the relevance of search results.

Videos

Softwares

Sketch Match: On 2011-08-17, the app, Sketch Match, was released to WP7 marketplace! It is powered by the MindFinder technology (sketch-based image search), with a well-refined sketch matching game.

Online Systems

Natural Image Search Engine

(Microsoft corpnet available only.)

 Clipart Image Search Engine

 (Microsoft corpnet available only.) 

Publications

• The paper "Sketch2Tag: Automatic Hand-Drawn Sketch Recognition" (Demo) was accepted by ACM Multimedia 2012.

• The paper "Query-Adaptive Shape Topic Mining for Hand-Drawn Sketch Recognition" was accepted by ACM Multimedia 2012.

• The paper "Free Hand-Drawn Sketch Segmentation" was accepted by ECCV 2012.

• Xianming Liu, Changhu Wang, Hongxun Yao, Lei Zhang, The Scale of Edges, in CVPR 2012.

• Changhu Wang, Jun Zhang, Bruce Yang, Lei Zhang, Sketch2Cartoon: Composing Cartoon Images by Sketching, in ACM Multimedia 2011.

• Wei Zheng, Changhu Wang, Xilin Chen, Shape-based Web Image Clustering for Unsupervised Object Detection, in ICME 2011.

• Changhu Wang, Yang Cao, Lei Zhang, MindFinder: A Sketch-based Image Search Engine based on Edgel Index (demo), in CVPR 2011.

• Yang Cao, Changhu Wang, Liqing Zhang, and Lei Zhang, Edgel Inverted Index for Large-Scale Sketch-based Image Search, in CVPR 2011.

• Yang Cao, Hai Wang, Changhu Wang, Zhiwei Li, Liqing Zhang, and Lei Zhang, MindFinder: Interactive Sketch-based Image Search on Millions of Images, in ACM Multimedia 2010 International Conference, 2010. (Best demo award)

• Changhu Wang, Zhiwei Li, and Lei Zhang, MindFinder: Image Search by Interactive Sketching and Tagging, in WWW'10: 19th International World Wide Web Conference, 2010.

 People

Changhu Wang, Lei Zhang, Bruce Yang, Xin Zou, Zhiwei Li, Yang Cao, Xianming Liu, Hai Wang*

 *past interns 

 Contact

Changhu Wang

Email: chw AT microsoft DOT com