Apparel silhouette attributes recognition

Computer vision and machine learning have great potential to aid in aesthetic judgments and exploration, particularly in the understanding of shapes. This paper presents our work in a well-defined but largely unexplored problem in this field: the automated recognition of apparel silhouette attributes for real-world products. Silhouette attributes, such as v-neck for dresses and open toe for shoes, are very important attributes for understanding the appearance of apparel but difficult to recognize automatically. We propose methods employing multi-modal features and supervised learning to automatically recognize silhouette attributes based on product images and the associated text. These algorithms are extensively tested on a large dataset of dresses, tops, and shoes provided by online retailers. The proposed silhouette recognition approach achieves high recognition accuracy on the nine silhouette categories. Our approach and experiments are also expected to stimulate future research on this topic.