Discriminative learning of apparel features

Fashion is a major segment in e-commerce with growing importance and a steadily increasing number of products. Since manual annotation of apparel items is very tedious, the product databases need to be organized automatically, e.g. by image classification. Common image classification approaches are based on features engineered for general purposes which perform poorly on specific images of apparel. We therefore propose to learn discriminative features based on a small set of annotated images. We experimentally evaluate our method on a dataset with 30,000 images containing apparel items, and compare it to other engineered and learned sets of features. The classification accuracy of our features is significantly superior to designed HOG and SIFT features (43.7% and 16.1% relative improvement, respectively). Our method allows for fast feature extraction and training, is easy to implement and, unlike deep convolutional networks, does not require powerful dedicated hardware.