Color Variants Identification in Fashion e-commerce via Contrastive Self-Supervised Representation Learning
This addresses a specific challenge in fashion e-commerce for improving product matching and search, but it is incremental as it builds on existing SSL techniques.
The paper tackles the problem of identifying color variants of fashion products in e-commerce by proposing a novel self-supervised learning model that focuses on different parts of apparel, outperforming existing SSL methods and sometimes the supervised model.
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.