XCI-Sketch: Extraction of Color Information from Images for Generation of Colored Outlines and Sketches

Published in Machine Learning for Creativity and Design workshop, NeurIPS, 2021

Harsh Rathod, Manisimha Varma, Parna Chowdhury, Sameer Saxena, V Manushree, Ankita Ghosh, Sahil Khose

Sketches are a medium to convey a visual scene from an individual’s creative perspective. The addition of color substantially enhances the overall expressivity of a sketch. This paper proposes two methods to mimic human-drawn colored sketches by utilizing the Contour Drawing Dataset. Our first approach renders colored outline sketches by applying image processing techniques aided by k-means color clustering. The second method uses a generative adversarial network to develop a model that can generate colored sketches from previously unobserved images. We assess the results obtained through quantitative and qualitative evaluations.