Democratising 2D Sketch to 3D Shape Retrieval Through Pivoting

This paper studies the problem of 2D sketch to 3D shape retrieval, but with a focus on democratising the process. We would like this democratisation to happen on two fronts: (i) to remove the need for large-scale specifically sourced 2D sketch and 3D shape datasets, and (ii) to remove restrictions on how well the user needs to sketch and from what viewpoints. The end result is a system that is trainable using existing datasets, and once trained allows users to sketch regardless of drawing skills and without restriction on view angle. We achieve all this via a clever use of pivoting, along with novel designs that injects 3D understanding of 2D sketches into the system. We perform pivoting using two existing datasets, each from a distant research domain to the other: 2D sketch and photo pairs from the sketch-based image retrieval field (SBIR), and 3D shapes from ShapeNet. It follows that the actual feature pivoting happens on photos from the former and 2D projections from the latter. Doing this already achieves most of our democratisation challenge – the level of 2D sketch abstraction embedded in SBIR dataset offers demoralization on drawing quality, and the whole thing works without a specifically sourced 2D sketch and 3D model pair. To further achieve democratisation on sketching viewpoint, we “lift” 2D sketches to 3D space using Blind Perspective-n-Points (BPnP) that injects 3D-aware information into the sketch encoder. Results show ours achieves competitive performance compared with fully-supervised baselines, while meeting all set democratisation goals.