We discuss two potentially challenging problems faced by the ecommerce industry. One relates to the problem faced by sellers while uploading pictures of products on the platform for sale and the consequent manual tagging involved. It gives rise to misclassifications leading to its absence from search results. The other problem concerns with the potential bottleneck in placing orders when a customer may not know the right keywords but has a visual impression of an image. An image based search algorithm can unleash the true potential of ecommerce by enabling customers to click a picture of an object and search for similar products without the need for typing. In this paper, we explore machine learning algorithms which can help us solve both these problems.
Several techniques to map various types of components, such as words, attributes, and images, into the embedded space have been studied. Most of them estimate the embedded representation of target entity as a point in the projective space. Some models, such as Word2Gauss, assume a probability distribution behind the embedded representation, which enables the spread or variance of the meaning of embedded target components to be captured and considered in more detail. We examine the method of estimating embedded representations as probability distributions for the interpretation of fashion-speci…
In this study, we propose a technology called the Fashion Intelligence System based on the visual-semantic embedding (VSE) model to quantify abstract and complex expressions unique to fashion, such as ''casual,'' ''adult-casual,'' and ''office-casual,'' and to support users' understanding of fashion. However, the existing VSE model does not support the situations in which the image is composed of multiple parts such as hair, tops, pants, skirts, and shoes. We propose partial VSE, which enables sensitive learning for each part of the fashion coordinates. The proposed model partially learns embe…
Image retrieval with natural language feedback offers the promise of catalog search based on fine-grained visual features that go beyond objects and binary attributes, facilitating real-world applications such as e-commerce. Our Modality-Agnostic Attention Fusion (MAAF) model combines image and text features and outperforms existing approaches on two visual search with modifying phrase datasets, Fashion IQ and CSS, and performs competitively on a dataset with only single-word modifications, Fashion200k. We also introduce two new challenging benchmarks adapted from Birds-to-Words and Spot-the-D…
University of Surrey（萨里大学）；iFlyTek-Surrey Joint Research Centre on Artificial Intelligence（讯飞-萨里人工智能联合研究中心）；Meta AI；Fudan University（复旦大学）
Large-scale Vision-and-Language (V+L) pre-training for representation learning has proven to be effective in boosting various downstream V+L tasks. However, when it comes to the fashion domain, existing V+L methods are inadequate as they overlook the unique characteristics of both the fashion V+L data and downstream tasks. In this work, we propose a novel fashion-focused V+L representation learning framework, dubbed as FashionViL. It contains two novel fashion-specific pre-training tasks designed particularly to exploit two intrinsic attributes with fashion V+L data. First, in contrast to othe…
With a growing demand for the search by image, many works have studied the task of fashion instance-level image retrieval (FIR). Furthermore, the recent works introduce a concept of fashion attribute manipulation (FAM) which manipulates a specific attribute (e.g color) of a fashion item while maintaining the rest of the attributes (e.g shape, and pattern). In this way, users can search not only "the same" items but also "similar" items with the desired attributes. FAM is a challenging task in that the attributes are hard to define, and the unique characteristics of a query are hard to be prese…
Universidade Lisboa（里斯本大学）；Farfetch（发发奇）；Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）
We propose a compact framework with guided attention for multi-label classification in the fashion domain. Our visual semantic attention model (VSAM) is supervised by automatic pose extraction creating a discriminative feature space. VSAM outperforms the state of the art for an in-house dataset and performs on par with previous works on the DeepFashion dataset, even without using any landmark annotations. Additionally, we show that our semantic attention module brings robustness to large quantities of wrong annotations and provides more interpretable results.
Zhejiang University of Technology（浙江工业大学）；Zhejiang Shuren University（浙江树人学院）；Hangzhou Normal University（杭州师范大学）
Instance-level image retrieval in fashion is a challenging issue owing to its increasing importance in real-scenario visual fashion search. Cross-domain fashion retrieval aims to match the unconstrained customer images as queries for photographs provided by retailers; however, it is a difficult task due to a wide range of consumer-to-shop (C2S) domain discrepancies and also considering that clothing image is vulnerable to various non-rigid deformations. To this end, we propose a novel multi-scale and multi-granularity feature learning network (MMFL-Net), which can jointly learn global-local ag…
In this paper, we present a method to learn a visual representation adapted for e-commerce products. Based on weakly supervised learning, our model learns from noisy datasets crawled on e-commerce website catalogs and does not require any manual labeling. We show that our representation can be used for downward classification tasks over clothing categories with different levels of granularity. We also demonstrate that the learnt representation is suitable for image retrieval. We achieve nearly state-of-art results on the DeepFashion In-Shop Clothes Retrieval and Categories Attributes Predictio…
Northwestern Polytechnical University（西北工业大学）；National Engineering Laboratory for Integrated Aero-Space-Ground-Ocean Big Data Application Technology（空天地海一体化大数据应用技术国家工程实验室）；University of Adelaide（阿德莱德大学）；MinSheng FinTech Corp. Ltd（民生金融科技股份有限公司）
Fashion products typically feature in compositions of a variety of styles at different clothing parts. In order to distinguish images of different fashion products, we need to extract both appearance (i.e., "how to describe") and localization (i.e.,"where to look") information, and their interactions. To this end, we propose a biologically inspired framework for image-based fashion product retrieval, which mimics the hypothesized twostream visual processing system of human brain. The proposed attentional heterogeneous bilinear network (AHBN) consists of two branches: a deep CNN branch to extra…
We study the task of conversational fashion image retrieval via multiturn natural language feedback. Most previous studies are based on single-turn settings. Existing models on multiturn conversational fashion image retrieval have limitations, such as employing traditional models, and leading to ineffective performance. We propose a novel framework that can effectively handle conversational fashion image retrieval with multiturn natural language feedback texts. One characteristic of the framework is that it searches for candidate images based on exploitation of the encoded reference image and …
Desiginovel（Desiginovel公司）；Pohang University of Science and Technology（浦项科技大学）
This paper describes Designovel's systems which are submitted to the Fashion IQ Challenge 2019. Goal of the challenge is building an image retrieval system where input query is a candidate image plus two text phrases describe user's feedback about visual differences between the candidate image and the search target. We built the systems by combining methods from recent work on deep metric learning, multi-modal retrieval and natual language processing. First, we encode both candidate and target images with CNNs into high-level representations, and encode text descriptions to a single text vecto…
Fashion image retrieval task aims to search relevant clothing items of a query image from the gallery. The previous recipes focus on designing different distance-based loss functions, pulling relevant pairs to be close and pushing irrelevant images apart. However, these methods ignore fine-grained features (e.g. neckband, cuff) of clothing images. In this paper, we propose a novel fashion image retrieval method leveraging both global and fine-grained features, dubbed Multi-Granular Alignment (MGA). Specifically, we design a Fine-Granular Aggregator(FGA) to capture and aggregate detailed patter…
Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；Walmart Global Tech Bangalore（沃尔玛全球科技班加罗尔分部）
We consider the problem of complementary fashion prediction. Existing approaches focus on learning an embedding space where fashion items from different categories that are visually compatible are closer to each other. However, creating such labeled outfits is intensive and also not feasible to generate all possible outfit combinations, especially with large fashion catalogs. In this work, we propose a semi-supervised learning approach where we leverage large unlabeled fashion corpus to create pseudo-positive and pseudo-negative outfits on the fly during training. For each labeled outfit in a …
FashionLens: Toward Versatile Fashion Image Retrieval via Task-Adaptive Learning
School of Computer Science and Technology, Harbin Institute of Technology (Shenzhen)（哈尔滨工业大学（深圳）计算机科学与技术学院）；Department of Data Science, City University of Hong Kong（香港城市大学数据科学系）；Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Southern University of Science and Technology（南方科技大学计算机科学与工程系）；School of Artificial Intelligence, Nanjing University（南京大学人工智能学院）；Institute of Data Science, National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学数据科学研究所）；School of Information Science and Technology, Harbin Institute of Technology (Shenzhen)（哈尔滨工业大学（深圳）信息科学与技术学院）；Shenzhen Loop Area Institute（深圳河套学院）
Karlsruhe Institute of Technology（卡尔斯鲁厄理工学院）；The University of Texas at Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）
What is the future of fashion? Tackling this question from a data-driven vision perspective, we propose to forecast visual style trends before they occur. We introduce the first approach to predict the future popularity of styles discovered from fashion images in an unsupervised manner. Using these styles as a basis, we train a forecasting model to represent their trends over time. The resulting model can hypothesize new mixtures of styles that will become popular in the future, discover style dynamics (trendy vs. classic), and name the key visual attributes that will dominate tomorrow's fashi…
We build a large-scale visual search system which finds similar product images given a fashion item. Defining similarity among arbitrary fashion-products is still remains a challenging problem, even there is no exact ground-truth. To resolve this problem, we define more than 90 fashion-related attributes, and combination of these attributes can represent thousands of unique fashion-styles. The fashion-attributes are one of the ingredients to define semantic similarity among fashion-product images. To build our system at scale, these fashion-attributes are again used to build an inverted indexi…
We present MMFashion, a comprehensive, flexible and user-friendly open-source visual fashion analysis toolbox based on PyTorch. This toolbox supports a wide spectrum of fashion analysis tasks, including Fashion Attribute Prediction, Fashion Recognition and Retrieval, Fashion Landmark Detection, Fashion Parsing and Segmentation and Fashion Compatibility and Recommendation. It covers almost all the mainstream tasks in fashion analysis community. MMFashion has several appealing properties. Firstly, MMFashion follows the principle of modular design. The framework is decomposed into different compo…
We describe a completely automated large scale visual recommendation system for fashion. Our focus is to efficiently harness the availability of large quantities of online fashion images and their rich meta-data. Specifically, we propose four data driven models in the form of Complementary Nearest Neighbor Consensus, Gaussian Mixture Models, Texture Agnostic Retrieval and Markov Chain LDA for solving this problem. We analyze relative merits and pitfalls of these algorithms through extensive experimentation on a large-scale data set and baseline them against existing ideas from color science. W…
Wuhan University（武汉大学）；Shenzhen University（深圳大学）；Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学）；University of South Carolina（南卡罗来纳大学）
It is well known that clothing fashion is a distinctive and often habitual trend in the style in which a person dresses. Clothing fashions are usually expressed with visual stimuli such as style, color, and texture. However, it is not clear which visual stimulus places higher/lower influence on the updating of clothing fashion. In this study, computer vision and machine learning techniques are employed to analyze the influence of different visual stimuli on clothing-fashion updates. Specifically, a classification-based model is proposed to quantify the influence of different visual stimuli, in…
While lots of people may think branding begins and ends with a logo, fashion brands communicate their uniqueness through a wide range of visual cues such as color, patterns and shapes. In this work, we analyze learned visual representations by deep networks that are trained to recognize fashion brands. In particular, the activation strength and extent of neurons are studied to provide interesting insights about visual brand expressions. The proposed method identifies where a brand stands in the spectrum of branding strategy, i.e., from trademark-emblazoned goods with bold logos to implicit no …
FIRE-CIR: Fine-grained Reasoning for Composed Fashion Image Retrieval
Louis Vuitton（路易威登）；Inria, École normale supérieure, CNRS, PSL Research University（法国国家信息与自动化研究所, 巴黎高等师范学院, 法国国家科学研究中心, 巴黎文理研究大学）；Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences and Center for Data Science, New York University（纽约大学库朗数学科学研究所与数据科学中心）
Finding clothes that fit is a hot topic in the e-commerce fashion industry. Most approaches addressing this problem are based on statistical methods relying on historical data of articles purchased and returned to the store. Such approaches suffer from the cold start problem for the thousands of articles appearing on the shopping platforms every day, for which no prior purchase history is available. We propose to employ visual data to infer size and fit characteristics of fashion articles. We introduce SizeNet, a weakly-supervised teacher-student training framework that leverages the power of …
Malong Technologies（码隆科技）；Shenzhen Malong Artificial Intelligence Research Center（深圳码隆人工智能研究中心）；University of Maryland, College Park（马里兰大学帕克分校）
Visual compatibility is critical for fashion analysis, yet is missing in existing fashion image synthesis systems. In this paper, we propose to explicitly model visual compatibility through fashion image inpainting. To this end, we present Fashion Inpainting Networks (FiNet), a two-stage image-to-image generation framework that is able to perform compatible and diverse inpainting. Disentangling the generation of shape and appearance to ensure photorealistic results, our framework consists of a shape generation network and an appearance generation network. More importantly, for each generation …
What defines a visual style? Fashion styles emerge organically from how people assemble outfits of clothing, making them difficult to pin down with a computational model. Low-level visual similarity can be too specific to detect stylistically similar images, while manually crafted style categories can be too abstract to capture subtle style differences. We propose an unsupervised approach to learn a style-coherent representation. Our method leverages probabilistic polylingual topic models based on visual attributes to discover a set of latent style factors. Given a collection of unlabeled fash…
For fashion outfits to be considered aesthetically pleasing, the garments that constitute them need to be compatible in terms of visual aspects, such as style, category and color. Previous works have defined visual compatibility as a binary classification task with items in a garment being considered as fully compatible or fully incompatible. However, this is not applicable to Outfit Maker applications where users create their own outfits and need to know which specific items may be incompatible with the rest of the outfit. To address this, we propose the Visual InCompatibility TransfORmer (VI…
VersaVogue: Visual Expert Orchestration and Preference Alignment for Unified Fashion Synthesis
Nanjing University of Science and Technology（南京理工大学）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；Nanjing University（南京大学）；Nanjing Forestry University（南京林业大学）
Estimating the preferences of consumers is of utmost importance for the fashion industry as appropriately leveraging this information can be beneficial in terms of profit. Trend detection in fashion is a challenging task due to the fast pace of change in the fashion industry. Moreover, forecasting the visual popularity of new garment designs is even more demanding due to lack of historical data. To this end, we propose MuQAR, a Multimodal Quasi-AutoRegressive deep learning architecture that combines two modules: (1) a multi-modal multi-layer perceptron processing categorical, visual and textua…
Shandong University（山东大学）；University of Amsterdam（阿姆斯特丹大学）
The task of fashion recommendation includes two main challenges: visual understanding and visual matching. Visual understanding aims to extract effective visual features. Visual matching aims to model a human notion of compatibility to compute a match between fashion items. Most previous studies rely on recommendation loss alone to guide visual understanding and matching. Although the features captured by these methods describe basic characteristics (e.g., color, texture, shape) of the input items, they are not directly related to the visual signals of the output items (to be recommended). Thi…
Visualizing an outfit is an essential part of shopping for clothes. Due to the combinatorial aspect of combining fashion articles, the available images are limited to a pre-determined set of outfits. In this paper, we broaden these visualizations by generating high-resolution images of fashion models wearing a custom outfit under an input body pose. We show that our approach can not only transfer the style and the pose of one generated outfit to another, but also create realistic images of human bodies and garments.
Polish-Japanese Academy of Information Technology（波兰-日本信息技术学院）；Warsaw University of Technology（华沙理工大学）
In this paper, we propose a multimodal search engine that combines visual and textual cues to retrieve items from a multimedia database aesthetically similar to the query. The goal of our engine is to enable intuitive retrieval of fashion merchandise such as clothes or furniture. Existing search engines treat textual input only as an additional source of information about the query image and do not correspond to the real-life scenario where the user looks for 'the same shirt but of denim'. Our novel method, dubbed DeepStyle, mitigates those shortcomings by using a joint neural network architec…
MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab（麻省理工学院-IBM沃森人工智能实验室）；IBM Research（IBM研究院）；UT Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）；Pryon
Conversational interfaces for the detail-oriented retail fashion domain are more natural, expressive, and user friendly than classical keyword-based search interfaces. In this paper, we introduce the Fashion IQ dataset to support and advance research on interactive fashion image retrieval. Fashion IQ is the first fashion dataset to provide human-generated captions that distinguish similar pairs of garment images together with side-information consisting of real-world product descriptions and derived visual attribute labels for these images. We provide a detailed analysis of the characteristics…
Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；Institute for Infocomm Research, Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR)（新加坡科技研究局资讯通信研究院）
In this paper, we propose a method for ranking fashion images to find the ones which might be liked by more people. We collect two new datasets from image sharing websites (Pinterest and Polyvore). We represent fashion images based on attributes: semantic attributes and data-driven attributes. To learn semantic attributes from limited training data, we use an algorithm on multi-task convolutional neural networks to share visual knowledge among different semantic attribute categories. To discover data-driven attributes unsupervisedly, we propose an algorithm to simultaneously discover visual cl…
Building effective recommender systems for domains like fashion is challenging due to the high level of subjectivity and the semantic complexity of the features involved (i.e., fashion styles). Recent work has shown that approaches to `visual' recommendation (e.g.~clothing, art, etc.) can be made more accurate by incorporating visual signals directly into the recommendation objective, using `off-the-shelf' feature representations derived from deep networks. Here, we seek to extend this contribution by showing that recommendation performance can be significantly improved by learning `fashion aw…
Many self-supervised learning (SSL) methods have been successful in learning semantically meaningful visual representations by solving pretext tasks. However, prior work in SSL focuses on tasks like object recognition or detection, which aim to learn object shapes and assume that the features should be invariant to concepts like colors and textures. Thus, these SSL methods perform poorly on downstream tasks where these concepts provide critical information. In this paper, we present an SSL framework that enables us to learn color and texture-aware features without requiring any labels during t…
Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology, Delhi（德里印德拉普拉斯塔信息技术研究所）
With the global transformation of the fashion industry and a rise in the demand for fashion items worldwide, the need for an effectual fashion recommendation has never been more. Despite various cutting-edge solutions proposed in the past for personalising fashion recommendation, the technology is still limited by its poor performance on new entities, i.e. the cold-start problem. In this paper, we attempt to address the cold-start problem for new users, by leveraging a novel visual preference modelling approach on a small set of input images. We demonstrate the use of our approach with feature…
Being able to forecast the popularity of new garment designs is very important in an industry as fast paced as fashion, both in terms of profitability and reducing the problem of unsold inventory. Here, we attempt to address this task in order to provide informative forecasts to fashion designers within a virtual reality designer application that will allow them to fine tune their creations based on current consumer preferences within an interactive and immersive environment. To achieve this we have to deal with the following central challenges: (1) the proposed method should not hinder the cr…
Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur（印度理工学院卡哈拉格普尔分校）；Microsoft（微软）
The simple approach of retrieving a closest match of a query image from one in the gallery, compares an image pair using sum of absolute difference in pixel or feature space. The process is computationally expensive, ill-posed to illumination, background composition, pose variation, as well as inefficient to be deployed on gallery sets with more than 1000 elements. Hashing is a faster alternative which involves representing images in reduced dimensional simple feature spaces. Encoding images into binary hash codes enables similarity comparison in an image-pair using the Hamming distance measur…
University of Maryland（马里兰大学）；Fudan University（复旦大学）
The ubiquity of online fashion shopping demands effective recommendation services for customers. In this paper, we study two types of fashion recommendation: (i) suggesting an item that matches existing components in a set to form a stylish outfit (a collection of fashion items), and (ii) generating an outfit with multimodal (images/text) specifications from a user. To this end, we propose to jointly learn a visual-semantic embedding and the compatibility relationships among fashion items in an end-to-end fashion. More specifically, we consider a fashion outfit to be a sequence (usually from t…
We propose to automatically create capsule wardrobes. Given an inventory of candidate garments and accessories, the algorithm must assemble a minimal set of items that provides maximal mix-and-match outfits. We pose the task as a subset selection problem. To permit efficient subset selection over the space of all outfit combinations, we develop submodular objective functions capturing the key ingredients of visual compatibility, versatility, and user-specific preference. Since adding garments to a capsule only expands its possible outfits, we devise an iterative approach to allow near-optimal …
Intel（英特尔）；Peking University（北京大学）；Columbia University（哥伦比亚大学）；JD AI Research（京东人工智能研究院）
Fashion attribute classification is of great importance to many high-level tasks such as fashion item search, fashion trend analysis, fashion recommendation, etc. The task is challenging due to the extremely imbalanced data distribution, particularly the attributes with only a few positive samples. In this paper, we introduce a hard-aware pipeline to make full use of "hard" samples/attributes. We first propose Hard-Aware BackPropagation (HABP) to efficiently and adaptively focus on training "hard" data. Then for the identified hard labels, we propose to synthesize more complementary samples fo…
Each day billions of photographs are uploaded to photo-sharing services and social media platforms. These images are packed with information about how people live around the world. In this paper we exploit this rich trove of data to understand fashion and style trends worldwide. We present a framework for visual discovery at scale, analyzing clothing and fashion across millions of images of people around the world and spanning several years. We introduce a large-scale dataset of photos of people annotated with clothing attributes, and use this dataset to train attribute classifiers via deep le…
Data Sciences-Image Sciences, Myntra（Myntra 数据科学-图像科学部）
In this paper, we address a crucial problem in fashion e-commerce (with respect to customer experience, as well as revenue): color variants identification, i.e., identifying fashion products that match exactly in their design (or style), but only to differ in their color. We propose a generic framework, that leverages deep visual Representation Learning at its heart, to address this problem for our fashion e-commerce platform. Our framework could be trained with supervisory signals in the form of triplets, that are obtained manually. However, it is infeasible to obtain manual annotations for t…
In this paper, we utilize deep visual Representation Learning to address an important problem in fashion e-commerce: color variants identification, i.e., identifying fashion products that match exactly in their design (or style), but only to differ in their color. At first we attempt to tackle the problem by obtaining manual annotations (depicting whether two products are color variants), and train a supervised triplet loss based neural network model to learn representations of fashion products. However, for large scale real-world industrial datasets such as addressed in our paper, it is infea…
Social media images are generally transformed by filtering to obtain aesthetically more pleasing appearances. However, CNNs generally fail to interpret both the image and its filtered version as the same in the visual analysis of social media images. We introduce Instagram Filter Removal Network (IFRNet) to mitigate the effects of image filters for social media analysis applications. To achieve this, we assume any filter applied to an image substantially injects a piece of additional style information to it, and we consider this problem as a reverse style transfer problem. The visual effects o…
The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；SenseTime Group Limited（商汤集团有限公司）
Fashion landmarks are functional key points defined on clothes, such as corners of neckline, hemline, and cuff. They have been recently introduced as an effective visual representation for fashion image understanding. However, detecting fashion landmarks are challenging due to background clutters, human poses, and scales. To remove the above variations, previous works usually assumed bounding boxes of clothes are provided in training and test as additional annotations, which are expensive to obtain and inapplicable in practice. This work addresses unconstrained fashion landmark detection, wher…
Amidst the rapid growth of fashion e-commerce, remote fitting of fashion articles remains a complex and challenging problem and a main driver of customers' frustration. Despite the recent advances in 3D virtual try-on solutions, such approaches still remain limited to a very narrow - if not only a handful - selection of articles, and often for only one size of those fashion items. Other state-of-the-art approaches that aim to support customers find what fits them online mostly require a high level of customer engagement and privacy-sensitive data (such as height, weight, age, gender, belly sha…
The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, CAS（中国科学院深圳先进技术研究院）
Visual fashion analysis has attracted many attentions in the recent years. Previous work represented clothing regions by either bounding boxes or human joints. This work presents fashion landmark detection or fashion alignment, which is to predict the positions of functional key points defined on the fashion items, such as the corners of neckline, hemline, and cuff. To encourage future studies, we introduce a fashion landmark dataset with over 120K images, where each image is labeled with eight landmarks. With this dataset, we study fashion alignment by cascading multiple convolutional neural …
