DeepBag: Recognizing Handbag Models

In this paper, we address the problem of branded handbag recognition. It is a challenging problem due to the non-rigid deformation, illumination changes, and inter-class similarity. We propose a novel framework based on deep convolutional neural network (CNN). Concretely, we propose a new CNN model, called feature selective joint classification - regression CNN (FSCR-CNN). Its advantages lie in two folds: 1) it alleviates the illumination changes by a feature selection strategy to focus on the color- nondiscriminative features in the network learning, and 2) rather than only targeting on the hard label (i.e., the handbag model), it also incorporates a soft label (i.e., a distribution measuring the similarity between the ground truth model and all the models to be trained) to construct the loss function for training CNN, which leads to a better classifier for handbags with large inter-class similarity. We evaluate the performance of our framework on a newly built branded handbag dataset. The results show that it performs favorably for recognizing handbags with 94.48% in accuracy. We also apply the proposed FSCR-CNN model in recognizing other fine-grained objects with state-of-the-art CNN architectures, which is able to achieve over 5% improvement in accuracy.