Mixing Images and Sketches for Retrieving Vector Drawings

Current approaches to content-based retrieval of multimedia data usually rely either on query by example or on sketches of the desired image, but not on both. In this paper, we propose a new query specification scheme, where digital images are combined with sketches, after vectorization, taking advantage of both methods. We selected a set of algorithms to perform image vectorization, taking into account the trade-off between vector image quality and processing time. This method of specifying queries is part of a system to retrieve vector drawings, which we briefly describe in this paper.