Among various representations of visual forms, human free-hand sketches occupy a special place since they are intuitive for humans to express impressions and ideas, and thus have long been used as a useful communicative tool Especially in the last decade, with the popularity of touch-screen devices, sketching has become accessible and ubiquitous As a result, a wide range of applications has been investigated Nevertheless, in computer vision, photographs still dominate researchers’ focus while other visual forms such as sketches and cartoons are largely underexplored This talk will introduce some progress achieved on sketch recognition and fine-grained sketch-based image retrieval (FG-SBIR), in the hope of inspiring more research on sketch understanding

Dr. Qian Yu received her doctorate from the School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science at the Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) in 2018. Before joining the Computer Vision Group of QMUL, Dr. Qian Yu graduated from Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications (BUPT) with a bachelor degree in Telecommunications Engineering with Management in 2014. Her research is on computer vision and deep learning, particularly sketch understanding. She is also interested in human vision and perception. Dr. Qian Yu was the recipient of the “BMVC 2015 Best Science Paper Award”.