Light-weight Sketch Recognition with Knowledge Distillation

Recognizing hand-drawn sketches is a promising starting point for various applications, such as assisting artists in creating 3D environments for games or virtual environment scenes quickly and efficiently from concept arts. In addition, by understanding drawings, we can generate 3D models that can be used for further design and development. Thus, in this paper, we aim to develop a novel lightweight network that can accurately recognize sketch drawings. We propose a lightweight-yet-efficient neural network based on MobileNetV2 for sketch recognition and employ knowledge distillation to train the proposed model from EfficientNet-B4. To evaluate the accuracy of the proposed method, we collect a dataset of sketches comprising 1800 drawings in 12 categories, ranging from furniture to animals. The experimental results show that our network model achieves an accuracy of 96.7%, with 96.9% precision, 96.7% recall, and 96.7% F1-score. These results demonstrate that the proposed approach has great potential for practical sketch recognition applications, such as interior design or VR scene generation.