Researchers at the Institut de Robòtica i Informàtica Industrial (IRI), a joint research centre of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) and the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), have developed a mathematical model that is able to assess whether a person is fashionably dressed or not, and give advice to improve it.
The creators are the IRI (CSIC-UPC) researchers Edgar Simo-Serra and Francesc Moreno-Noguer, and University of Toronto researchers, Sanja Fidler and Raquel Urtasun. The algorithm has been published in the paper "Neuroaesthetics in Fashion: Modeling the Perception of fashionability" at the Computer Vision Congress CVPR 2015, the most important in the world in this field, which was held in June at Boston (USA).
The objective behind this work is to build mathematical models that are able to understand the concept of "fashion". That is, to find out what makes a particular form of dress "fashionable" or not, and based on that, to make recommendations on how to dress.
To do this, the researchers created an Internet fashion dataset, consisting of over 144,000 user posts with images and their associated information. The new algorithm is then able to learn to predict the fashionability of different pictures by using the "likes" received by each user post.
To build the model, the scientists have combined a deep neural network with a Conditional Random Fields probabilistic model, which takes into account various factors such as the type of garment, the kind of user and the scene behind the person. The system is not only able to learn and predict how fashionable a person looks, but more importantly, is able to give fashion advice to the users.
Edgar Simo-Serra and Francesc Moreno-Noguer are CSIC researchers at the Institut de Robotica i Informatica Industrial (CSIC-UPC), in Barcelona. Sanja Fidler and Raquel Urtasun are assistant professors at the University of Toronto.
Links:
‘Neuroaesthetics in Fashion: Modeling the Perception of Fashionability’
http://www.cv-foundation.org/openaccess/content_cvpr_2015/papers/Simo-Serra_Neuroaesthetics_in_Fashion_2015_CVPR_paper.pdf
CVPR 2015: http://www.pamitc.org/cvpr15/
Edgar Simo-Serra website at the IRI (CSIC-UPC):
http://www.iri.upc.edu/people/esimo/en/research/fashionability/