With the rapid proliferation of smart mobile devices, users now take millions of photos every day. These include large numbers of clothing and accessory images. We would like to answer questions like What outfit goes well with this pair of shoes?' To answer these types of questions, one has to go beyond learning visual similarity and learn a visual notion of compatibility across categories. In this paper, we propose a novel learning framework to help answer these types of questions. The main idea of this framework is to learn a feature transformation from images of items into a latent space that expresses compatibility. For the feature transformation, we use a Siamese Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architecture, where training examples are pairs of items that are either compatible or incompatible. We model compatibility based on co-occurrence in large-scale user behavior data; in particular co-purchase data from Amazon.com. To learn cross-category fit, we introduce a strategic method to sample training data, where pairs of items are heterogeneous dyads, i.e., the two elements of a pair belong to different high-level categories. While this approach is applicable to a wide variety of settings, we focus on the representative problem of learning compatible clothing style. Our results indicate that the proposed framework is capable of learning semantic information about visual style and is able to generate outfits of clothes, with items from different categories, that go well together.
Metric learning is used to learn a high dimensional embedding space. This research field is wide and we refer to the work of Kulis @cite_10 for a comprehensive survey. A different approach is the use of that assign semantic labels to specific dimensions or regions in the feature space. An example is Whittle search that uses relative attributes to guide product search @cite_7 . In contrast with these works, we want to learn a feature transformation from the input image to a similarity metric that does not rely on discrete and pre-defined attributes.
@cite_10 @cite_7
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Metric learning aims at finding a distance that approximates a task-specific notion of semantic similarity. Typically, a Mahalanobis distance is learned from pairs of data labeled as being semantically similar or not. In this paper, we learn such metrics in a weakly supervised setting where "bags" of instances are labeled with "bags" of labels. We formulate the problem as a multiple instance learning (MIL) problem over pairs of bags. If two bags share at least one label, we label the pair positive, and negative otherwise. We propose to learn a metric using those labeled pairs of bags, leading to MildML, for multiple instance logistic discriminant metric learning. MildML iterates between updates of the metric and selection of putative positive pairs of examples from positive pairs of bags. To evaluate our approach, we introduce a large and challenging data set, Labeled Yahoo! News, which we have manually annotated and contains 31147 detected faces of 5873 different people in 20071 images. We group the faces detected in an image into a bag, and group the names detected in the caption into a corresponding set of labels. When the labels come from manual annotation, we find that MildML using the bag-level annotation performs as well as fully supervised metric learning using instance-level annotation. We also consider performance in the case of automatically extracted labels for the bags, where some of the bag labels do not correspond to any example in the bag. In this case MildML works substantially better than relying on noisy instance-level annotations derived from the bag-level annotation by resolving face-name associations in images with their captions. Metric learning aims to construct an embedding where two extracted features corresponding to the same identity are likely to be closer than features from different identities. This paper presents a method for learning such a feature space where the cosine similarity is effectively optimized through a simple re-parametrization of the conventional softmax classification regime. At test time, the final classification layer can be stripped from the network to facilitate nearest neighbor queries on unseen individuals using the cosine similarity metric. This approach presents a simple alternative to direct metric learning objectives such as siamese networks that have required sophisticated pair or triplet sampling strategies in the past. The method is evaluated on two large-scale pedestrian re-identification datasets where competitive results are achieved overall. In particular, we achieve better generalization on the test set compared to a network trained with triplet loss. Metric learning makes it plausible to learn semantically meaningful distances for complex distributions of data using label or pairwise constraint information. However, to date, most metric learning methods are based on a single Mahalanobis metric, which cannot handle heterogeneous data well. Those that learn multiple metrics throughout the feature space have demonstrated superior accuracy, but at a severe cost to computational efficiency. Here, we adopt a new angle on the metric learning problem and learn a single metric that is able to implicitly adapt its distance function throughout the feature space. This metric adaptation is accomplished by using a random forest-based classifier to underpin the distance function and incorporate both absolute pairwise position and standard relative position into the representation. We have implemented and tested our method against state of the art global and multi-metric methods on a variety of data sets. Overall, the proposed method outperforms both types of method in terms of accuracy (consistently ranked first) and is an order of magnitude faster than state of the art multi-metric methods (16x faster in the worst case). Deep metric learning aims to learn a function mapping image pixels to embedding feature vectors that model the similarity between images. The majority of current approaches are non-parametric, learning the metric space directly through the supervision of similar (pairs) or relatively similar (triplets) sets of images. A difficult challenge for training these approaches is mining informative samples of images as the metric space is learned with only the local context present within a single mini-batch. Alternative approaches use parametric metric learning to eliminate the need for sampling through supervision of images to proxies. Although this simplifies optimization, such proxy-based approaches have lagged behind in performance. In this work, we demonstrate that a standard classification network can be transformed into a variant of proxy-based metric learning that is competitive against non-parametric approaches across a wide variety of image retrieval tasks. We address key challenges in proxy-based metric learning such as performance under extreme classification and describe techniques to stabilize and learn higher dimensional embeddings. We evaluate our approach on the CAR-196, CUB-200-2011, Stanford Online Product, and In-Shop datasets for image retrieval and clustering. Finally, we show that our softmax classification approach can learn high-dimensional binary embeddings that achieve new state-of-the-art performance on all datasets evaluated with a memory footprint that is the same or smaller than competing approaches.