Towards Unsupervised Sketch-based Image Retrieval

Current supervised sketch-based image retrieval (SBIR) methods achieve excellent performance. However, the cost of data collection and labeling imposes an intractable barrier to practical deployment of real applications. In this paper, we present the first attempt at unsupervised SBIR to remove the labeling cost (category annotations and sketch-photo pairings) that is conventionally needed for training. Existing single-domain unsupervised representation learning methods perform poorly in this application, due to the unique cross-domain (sketch and photo) nature of the problem. We therefore introduce a novel framework that simultaneously performs unsupervised representation learning and sketch-photo domain alignment. Technically this is underpinned by exploiting joint distribution optimal transport (JDOT) to align data from different domains during representation learning, which we extend with trainable cluster prototypes and feature memory banks to further improve scalability and efficacy. Extensive experiments show that our framework achieves excellent performance in the new unsupervised setting, and performs comparably or better than state-of-the-art in the zero-shot setting.