A New Algorithm for Sketch-Based Fashion Image Retrieval Based on Cross-Domain Transformation

Due to the rise of e-commerce platforms, online shopping has become a trend. However, the current mainstream retrieval methods are still limited to using text or exemplar images as input. For huge commodity databases, it remains a long-standing unsolved problem for users to find the interested products quickly. Different from the traditional text-based and exemplar-based image retrieval techniques, sketch-based image retrieval (SBIR) provides a more intuitive and natural way for users to specify their search need. Due to the large cross-domain discrepancy between the free-hand sketch and fashion images, retrieving fashion images by sketches is a significantly challenging task. In this work, we propose a new algorithm for sketch-based fashion image retrieval based on cross-domain transformation. In our approach, the sketch and photo are first transformed into the same domain. Then, the sketch domain similarity and the photo domain similarity are calculated, respectively, and fused to improve the retrieval accuracy of fashion images. Moreover, the existing fashion image datasets mostly contain photos only and rarely contain the sketch-photo pairs. Thus, we contribute a fine-grained sketch-based fashion image retrieval dataset, which includes 36,074 sketch-photo pairs. Specifically, when retrieving on our Fashion Image dataset, the accuracy of our model ranks the correct match at the top-1 which is 96.6%, 92.1%, 91.0%, and 90.5% for clothes, pants, skirts, and shoes, respectively. Extensive experiments conducted on our dataset and two fine-grained instance-level datasets, i.e., QMUL-shoes and QMUL-chairs, show that our model has achieved a better performance than other existing methods

FaD-VLP: Fashion Vision-and-Language Pre-training towards Unified Retrieval and Captioning

Multimodal tasks in the fashion domain have significant potential for e-commerce, but involve challenging vision-and-language learning problems - e.g., retrieving a fashion item given a reference image plus text feedback from a user. Prior works on multimodal fashion tasks have either been limited by the data in individual benchmarks, or have leveraged generic vision-and-language pre-training but have not taken advantage of the characteristics of fashion data. Additionally, these works have mainly been restricted to multimodal understanding tasks. To address these gaps, we make two key contributions. First, we propose a novel fashion-specific pre-training framework based on weakly-supervised triplets constructed from fashion image-text pairs. We show the triplet-based tasks are an effective addition to standard multimodal pre-training tasks. Second, we propose a flexible decoder-based model architecture capable of both fashion retrieval and captioning tasks. Together, our model design and pre-training approach are competitive on a diverse set of fashion tasks, including cross-modal retrieval, image retrieval with text feedback, image captioning, relative image captioning, and multimodal categorization.Comment: 14 pages, 4 figures. To appear at Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP) 202

A Strong Baseline for Fashion Retrieval with Person Re-Identification Models

Fashion retrieval is the challenging task of finding an exact match for fashion items contained within an image. Difficulties arise from the fine-grained nature of clothing items, very large intra-class and inter-class variance. Additionally, query and source images for the task usually come from different domains - street photos and catalogue photos respectively. Due to these differences, a significant gap in quality, lighting, contrast, background clutter and item presentation exists between domains. As a result, fashion retrieval is an active field of research both in academia and the industry. Inspired by recent advancements in Person Re-Identification research, we adapt leading ReID models to be used in fashion retrieval tasks. We introduce a simple baseline model for fashion retrieval, significantly outperforming previous state-of-the-art results despite a much simpler architecture. We conduct in-depth experiments on Street2Shop and DeepFashion datasets and validate our results. Finally, we propose a cross-domain (cross-dataset) evaluation method to test the robustness of fashion retrieval models.Comment: 33 pages, 14 figure

Cross-Domain Image Retrieval with Attention Modeling

With the proliferation of e-commerce websites and the ubiquitousness of smart phones, cross-domain image retrieval using images taken by smart phones as queries to search products on e-commerce websites is emerging as a popular application. One challenge of this task is to locate the attention of both the query and database images. In particular, database images, e.g. of fashion products, on e-commerce websites are typically displayed with other accessories, and the images taken by users contain noisy background and large variations in orientation and lighting. Consequently, their attention is difficult to locate. In this paper, we exploit the rich tag information available on the e-commerce websites to locate the attention of database images. For query images, we use each candidate image in the database as the context to locate the query attention. Novel deep convolutional neural network architectures, namely TagYNet and CtxYNet, are proposed to learn the attention weights and then extract effective representations of the images. Experimental results on public datasets confirm that our approaches have significant improvement over the existing methods in terms of the retrieval accuracy and efficiency.Comment: 8 pages with an extra reference pag

MMFL-Net: Multi-scale and Multi-granularity Feature Learning for Cross-domain Fashion Retrieval

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 aggregation feature representations of clothing images in a unified framework, aiming to train a cross-domain model for C2S fashion visual similarity. First, a new semantic-spatial feature fusion part is designed to bridge the semantic-spatial gap by applying top-down and bottom-up bidirectional multi-scale feature fusion. Next, a multi-branch deep network architecture is introduced to capture global salient, part-informed, and local detailed information, and extracting robust and discrimination feature embedding by integrating the similarity learning of coarse-to-fine embedding with the multiple granularities. Finally, the improved trihard loss, center loss, and multi-task classification loss are adopted for our MMFL-Net, which can jointly optimize intra-class and inter-class distance and thus explicitly improve intra-class compactness and inter-class discriminability between its visual representations for feature learning. Furthermore, our proposed model also combines the multi-task attribute recognition and classification module with multi-label semantic attributes and product ID labels. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed MMFL-Net achieves significant improvement over the state-of-the-art methods on the two datasets, DeepFashion-C2S and Street2Shop.Comment: 27 pages, 12 figures, Published by <Multimedia Tools and Applications