Abstract: Various technologies described herein pertain to constructing mid-level sketch tokens for use in tasks, such as object detection and contour detection. Sketch patches can be extracted from binary images that comprise hand-drawn contours. The hand-drawn contours in the binary images can correspond to contours in training images. The sketch patches can be clustered to form sketch token classes. Moreover, color patches from the training images can be extracted and low-level features of the color patches can be computed. Further, a classifier that labels mid-level sketch tokens can be trained. Such training of the classifier can be through supervised learning of a mapping from the low-level features of the color patches to the sketch token classes.