AI-Sketcher : A Deep Generative Model for Producing High-Quality Sketches

Abstract

Sketch drawings play an important role in assisting humans in communication and creative design since ancient period. This situation has motivated the development of artificial intelligence (AI) techniques for automatically generating sketches based on user input. Sketch-RNN, a sequence-to-sequence variational autoencoder (VAE) model, was developed for this purpose and known as a state-of-the-art technique. However, it suffers from limitations, including the generation of lowquality results and its incapability to support multi-class generations. To address these issues, we introduced AI-Sketcher, a deep generative model for generating high-quality multiclass sketches. Our model improves drawing quality by employing a CNN-based autoencoder to capture the positional information of each stroke at the pixel level. It also introduces an influence layer to more precisely guide the generation of each stroke by directly referring to the training data. To support multi-class sketch generation, we provided a conditional vector that can help differentiate sketches under various classes. The proposed technique was evaluated based on two large-scale sketch datasets, and results demonstrated its power in generating high-quality sketches.