BACKGROUND

In an ecommerce marketplace, customers view millions of images per day, such as images of fashion. Third-party vendors supply images of their products to the ecommerce marketplace. As customer preferences and trends vary over time, website developers want to quickly test new ideas on website retail pages. While it is usually straightforward to implement low-level image transformations, such as resizing or changing the image quality, content aware image processing creates novel challenges. Replacing images in an image catalogue typically involves coordination with a large number of the third-party vendors and significant quality assurance efforts. Fast iterations of image replacement are difficult to implement. Performing image alterations at request time allows more control over the process, but the latency concerns and the number of image alterations makes request-time alterations impractical.

