Measuring clothing image similarity with bundled features

Abstract

Purpose

Clothing retrieval is very useful to help the clients to efficiently search out the apparel they want. Currently, the mainstream clothing retrieval methods are attribute semantics based, which however are inconvenient for common clients. The purpose of this paper is to provide an easy‐to‐operate apparels retrieval mode with the authors' novel approach of clothing image similarity measurement.

Design/methodology/approach

The authors measure the similarity between two clothing images by computing the weighted similarities between their bundled features. Each bundled feature consists of the point features (SIFT) which are further quantified into local visual words in a maximally stable extremal region (MSER). The authors weight the importance of bundled features by the precision of SIFT quantification and local word frequency that reflects the frequency of the common visual words appeared in two bundled features. The bundled features similarity is computed from two aspects: local word frequency; and SIFTs distance matrix that records the distances between every two SIFTs in a bundled feature.

Findings

Local word frequencies improves the recognition between two bundled features with the same common visual words but different local word frequency. SIFTs distance matrix has the merits of scale invariance and rotation invariance. Experimental results show that this approach works well in the situations with large clothing deformation, background exchange and part hidden, etc. And the similarity measurement of Weight+Bundled+LWF+SDM is the best.

Originality/value

This paper presents an apparel retrieval mode based on local visual features, and presents a new algorithm for bundled feature matching and apparel similarity measurement.

Citation

Chen, Q., Li, J., Liu, Z., Lu, G., Bi, X. and Wang, B. (2013), "Measuring clothing image similarity with bundled features", International Journal of Clothing Science and Technology, Vol. 25 No. 2, pp. 119-130. https://doi.org/10.1108/09556221311298619