A survey of sketch-based image retrieval

Sketch-based image retrieval (SBIR) has been studied since the early 1990s and has drawn more and more interest recently. Yet, a comprehensive review of the SBIR field is still absent. This survey tries to fill in this gap by reviewing the representative papers studying the SBIR problem. More importantly, this survey tries to answer two important questions which are generally not well discussed: what are the objectives of SBIR, and what is the general methodology of SBIR? The reviewed papers are organized in a chronological way and analyzed by answering these two important questions. As a novel trend, fine-grained SBIR has become the main topic for the recent research. The discussion on it is also integrated. From this survey, we hope that different perspectives can be observed, common values can be discovered and new ideas can be inspired.