Sketch-based understanding is a key process in visual perception. Sketching is also a natural and primitive means of communication; it is how our ancestors transmitted ideas, stories, and activities.
Given the critical role sketching plays in visual perception, it is natural to incorporate this process into the field of computer vision. Indeed, we have seen an increasing interest in this topic by the computer vision community, addressing a diversity of sketch-based tasks like sketch classification, sketch representation learning, sketch-guided object localization, sketch-based image retrieval, sketch-to-photo translation, among others. All the sketch-based understanding tasks have gained interest with time, which can be attributed to the development of deep neural networks capable of extracting semantic representations from images, and the ever growing access to smartphones that can be used as a drawing tablet.
