Multi-modal joint embedding for fashion product retrieval

© 20xx IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.Finding a product in the fashion world can be a daunting task. Everyday, e-commerce sites are updating with thousands of images and their associated metadata (textual information), deepening the problem, akin to finding a needle in a haystack. In this paper, we leverage both the images and textual meta-data and propose a joint multi-modal embedding that maps both the text and images into a common latent space. Distances in the latent space correspond to similarity between products, allowing us to effectively perform retrieval in this latent space, which is both efficient and accurate. We train this embedding using large-scale real world e-commerce data by both minimizing the similarity between related products and using auxiliary classification networks to that encourage the embedding to have semantic meaning. We compare against existing approaches and show significant improvements in retrieval tasks on a large-scale e-commerce dataset. We also provide an analysis of the different metadata.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Matching-CNN Meets KNN: Quasi-Parametric Human Parsing

Both parametric and non-parametric approaches have demonstrated encouraging performances in the human parsing task, namely segmenting a human image into several semantic regions (e.g., hat, bag, left arm, face). In this work, we aim to develop a new solution with the advantages of both methodologies, namely supervision from annotated data and the flexibility to use newly annotated (possibly uncommon) images, and present a quasi-parametric human parsing model. Under the classic K Nearest Neighbor (KNN)-based nonparametric framework, the parametric Matching Convolutional Neural Network (M-CNN) is proposed to predict the matching confidence and displacements of the best matched region in the testing image for a particular semantic region in one KNN image. Given a testing image, we first retrieve its KNN images from the annotated/manually-parsed human image corpus. Then each semantic region in each KNN image is matched with confidence to the testing image using M-CNN, and the matched regions from all KNN images are further fused, followed by a superpixel smoothing procedure to obtain the ultimate human parsing result. The M-CNN differs from the classic CNN in that the tailored cross image matching filters are introduced to characterize the matching between the testing image and the semantic region of a KNN image. The cross image matching filters are defined at different convolutional layers, each aiming to capture a particular range of displacements. Comprehensive evaluations over a large dataset with 7,700 annotated human images well demonstrate the significant performance gain from the quasi-parametric model over the state-of-the-arts, for the human parsing task.Comment: This manuscript is the accepted version for CVPR 201

Semantic Object Parsing with Graph LSTM

By taking the semantic object parsing task as an exemplar application scenario, we propose the Graph Long Short-Term Memory (Graph LSTM) network, which is the generalization of LSTM from sequential data or multi-dimensional data to general graph-structured data. Particularly, instead of evenly and fixedly dividing an image to pixels or patches in existing multi-dimensional LSTM structures (e.g., Row, Grid and Diagonal LSTMs), we take each arbitrary-shaped superpixel as a semantically consistent node, and adaptively construct an undirected graph for each image, where the spatial relations of the superpixels are naturally used as edges. Constructed on such an adaptive graph topology, the Graph LSTM is more naturally aligned with the visual patterns in the image (e.g., object boundaries or appearance similarities) and provides a more economical information propagation route. Furthermore, for each optimization step over Graph LSTM, we propose to use a confidence-driven scheme to update the hidden and memory states of nodes progressively till all nodes are updated. In addition, for each node, the forgets gates are adaptively learned to capture different degrees of semantic correlation with neighboring nodes. Comprehensive evaluations on four diverse semantic object parsing datasets well demonstrate the significant superiority of our Graph LSTM over other state-of-the-art solutions.Comment: 18 page