Emerging Topic Detection on the Meta-data of Images from Fashion Social Media

Abstract

In the fashion industry where social media has a growing presence, it is increasingly important to find the emergence of people's new tastes in the early stage based on the photos posted there. However, the amount of photos posted on fashion social media is so large that it is almost impossible for people to examine them manually. Also, previous studies on image analysis in social media focus only on individual items for trend detection. Therefore, in this research, we propose a novel framework for capturing changes in people's tastes in terms of coordination rather than individual items. In the framework, we apply Emerging Topic Detection (ETD) to multiple meta-data of images automatically extracted by deep learning. In ETD, new topics which did not exist previously are detected by comparing multiple time windows. To better capture the nature of fashion topics, we employ a clustering method MULIC as a topic detection method, which is density-based, centroid-based, and designed for categorical data. Our experiments with real-world data, in terms of method stability, qualitative evaluation of the output, and experts review, confirmed that the Emerging Topics were properly captured.