Clothes search in consumer photos via color matching and attribute learning

Abstract

Automatic clothes search in consumer photos is not a trivial problem as photos are usually taken under completely uncontrolled realistic imaging conditions. In this paper, a novel framework is presented to tackle this issue by leveraging low-level features (e.g., color) and high-level features (attributes) of clothes. First, a content-based image retrieval(CBIR) approach based on the bag-of-visual-words (BOW) model is developed as our baseline system, in which a codebook is constructed from extracted dominant color patches. A reranking approach is then proposed to improve search quality by exploiting clothes attributes, including the type of clothes, sleeves, patterns, etc. The experiments on photo collections show that our approach is robust to large variations of images taken in unconstrained environment, and the reranking algorithm based on attribute learning significantly improves retrieval performance in combination with the proposed baseline.