CREATIVE SKETCH GENERATION

Abstract

Sketching or doodling is a popular creative activity that people engage in. However, most existing work in automatic sketch understanding or generation has focused on sketches that are quite mundane. In this work, we introduce two datasets of creative sketches -Creative Birds and Creative Creatures -containing 10k sketches each along with part annotations. We propose DoodlerGANa part-based Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) -to generate unseen compositions of novel part appearances. Quantitative evaluations as well as human studies demonstrate that sketches generated by our approach are more creative and of higher quality than existing approaches. In fact, in Creative Birds, subjects prefer sketches generated by DoodlerGAN over those drawn by humans!

1. INTRODUCTION

The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination. -Albert Einstein From serving as a communication tool since prehistoric times to its growing prevalence with ubiquitous touch-screen devices -sketches are an indispensable visual modality. Sketching is often used during brainstorming to help the creative process, and is a popular creative activity in itself. Sketch-related AI so far has primarily focused on mimicking the human ability to perceive rich visual information from simple line drawings (Yu et al., 2015; Li et al., 2018) and to generate minimal depictions that capture the salient aspects of our visual world (Ha & Eck, 2018; Isola et al., 2017) . Most existing datasets contain sketches drawn by humans to realistically mimic common objects (Eitz et al., 2012; Sangkloy et al., 2016; Jongejan et al., 2016; Wang et al., 2019) . In this work we focus on creative sketches. AI systems that can generate and interpret creative sketches can inspire, enhance or augment the human creative process or final artifact. Concrete scenarios include automatically generating an initial sketch that a user can build on, proposing the next set of strokes or completions based on partial sketches drawn by a user, presenting the user with possible interpretations of the sketch that may inspire further ideas, etc. * The work was done when the first author interned at Facebook AI Research. 1



Figure 1: Cherry-picked example sketches from our proposed datasets: Creative Birds (left) and Creative Creatures (right). See random examples in Figure 2 and Figures 12 and 13 in the Appendix.

