Identifying colors of products and associated personalized recommendation engine in e-fashion business

Abstract

One of the important factors ignored in the literature in e-marketing is “the color” of a product. While one may be able to identify the dominating color of a product based on the overall impression, it is not easy to mechanize the process to determine the dominating color. Accordingly, in many applications, the color of a product is defined subjectively by those who enter the data. Consequently, the color of a product has been a missing link in e-marketing. The purpose of this research is to fill this gap by developing an algorithmic procedure for identifying the dominating color of a product by analyzing a digital image of the product. The algorithmic procedure enables one to reveal color preferences of consumers by analyzing the digital images of the products obtained from the purchasing records. A recommendation engine is also developed based on color class preference vectors of individual consumers.