Sandeep Repakula

Ujjal Kr Dutta, Sandeep Repakula, Maulik Parmar et al.

In this paper, we address a crucial problem in fashion e-commerce (with respect to customer experience, as well as revenue): color variants identification, i.e., identifying fashion products that match exactly in their design (or style), but only to differ in their color. We propose a generic framework, that leverages deep visual Representation Learning at its heart, to address this problem for our fashion e-commerce platform. Our framework could be trained with supervisory signals in the form of triplets, that are obtained manually. However, it is infeasible to obtain manual annotations for the entire huge collection of data usually present in fashion e-commerce platforms, such as ours, while capturing all the difficult corner cases. But, to our rescue, interestingly we observed that this crucial problem in fashion e-commerce could also be solved by simple color jitter based image augmentation, that recently became widely popular in the contrastive Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) literature, that seeks to learn visual representations without using manual labels. This naturally led to a question in our mind: Could we leverage SSL in our use-case, and still obtain comparable performance to our supervised framework? The answer is, Yes! because, color variant fashion objects are nothing but manifestations of a style, in different colors, and a model trained to be invariant to the color (with, or without supervision), should be able to recognize this! This is what the paper further demonstrates, both qualitatively, and quantitatively, while evaluating a couple of state-of-the-art SSL techniques, and also proposing a novel method.

Ujjal Kr Dutta, Sandeep Repakula, Maulik Parmar et al.

In this paper, we utilize deep visual Representation Learning to address an important problem in fashion e-commerce: color variants identification, i.e., identifying fashion products that match exactly in their design (or style), but only to differ in their color. At first we attempt to tackle the problem by obtaining manual annotations (depicting whether two products are color variants), and train a supervised triplet loss based neural network model to learn representations of fashion products. However, for large scale real-world industrial datasets such as addressed in our paper, it is infeasible to obtain annotations for the entire dataset, while capturing all the difficult corner cases. Interestingly, we observed that color variants are essentially manifestations of color jitter based augmentations. Thus, we instead explore Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) to solve this problem. We observed that existing state-of-the-art SSL methods perform poor, for our problem. To address this, we propose a novel SSL based color variants model that simultaneously focuses on different parts of an apparel. Quantitative and qualitative evaluation shows that our method outperforms existing SSL methods, and at times, the supervised model.

Abhinav Ravi, Sandeep Repakula, Ujjal Kr Dutta et al.

Have you ever looked at an Instagram model, or a model in a fashion e-commerce web-page, and thought \textit{"Wish I could get a list of fashion items similar to the ones worn by the model!"}. This is what we address in this paper, where we propose a novel computer vision based technique called \textbf{ShopLook} to address the challenging problem of recommending similar fashion products. The proposed method has been evaluated at Myntra (www.myntra.com), a leading online fashion e-commerce platform. In particular, given a user query and the corresponding Product Display Page (PDP) against the query, the goal of our method is to recommend similar fashion products corresponding to the entire set of fashion articles worn by a model in the PDP full-shot image (the one showing the entire model from head to toe). The novelty and strength of our method lies in its capability to recommend similar articles for all the fashion items worn by the model, in addition to the primary article corresponding to the query. This is not only important to promote cross-sells for boosting revenue, but also for improving customer experience and engagement. In addition, our approach is also capable of recommending similar products for User Generated Content (UGC), eg., fashion article images uploaded by users. Formally, our proposed method consists of the following components (in the same order): i) Human keypoint detection, ii) Pose classification, iii) Article localisation and object detection, along with active learning feedback, and iv) Triplet network based image embedding model.