A mobile visual search application for content based image retrieval in the fashion domain

Abstract

In this study we propose a mobile application which interfaces with a Content-Based Image Retrieval engine for online shopping in the fashion domain. Using this application it is possible to take a picture of a garment to retrieve its most similar products. The proposed method is firstly presented as an application in which the user manually select the name of the subject framed by the camera, before sending the request to the server. In the second part we propose an advanced approach which automatically classifies the object of interest, in this way it is possible to minimize the effort required by the user during the query process. In order to evaluate the performance of the proposed method, we have collected three datasets: the first contains clothing images of products taken from different online shops, whereas for the other datasets we have used images and video frames of clothes taken by Internet users. The results show the feasibility in the use of the proposed mobile application in a real scenario.