A sketch-based image retrieval method, device and system, to improve accuracy of image searching from a scene sketch image. For example, the image retrieval method, device and system can be used to retrieve a target scene image from a collection of stored images in a storage (i.e., an image collection). The image retrieval method includes: segmenting the scene sketch image using an image segmentation module into semantic object-level instances, and fine-grained features are obtained for each object instance, generating an attribute graph which integrates the fine-grained features for each semantic object instance detected from the query scene sketch image, generating a feature graph by using a graph encoder module from the attribute graph, and computing a similarity or distance between the feature graphs of the query scene sketch image and the scene images in the image collection by a graph matching module and the most similar scene images are returned.