Discrete binary hashing towards efficient fashion recommendation

Abstract

How to match clothing well is always a troublesome problem in our daily life, especially when we are shopping online to select a pair of matched pieces of clothing from tens of thousands available selections. To help common customers overcome selection difficulties, recent studies in the recommender system area have started to infer the fashion matching results automatically. The conventional fashion recommendation is normally achieved by considering visual similarity of clothing items or/and item co-purchase history from existing shopping transactions. Due to the high complexity of visual features and the lack of historical item purchase records, most of the existing work is unlikely to make an efficient and accurate recommendation. To address the problem, in this paper we propose a new model called Discrete Supervised Fashion Coordinates Hashing (DSFCH). Its main objective is to learn meaningful yet compact high level features of clothing items, which are represented as binary hash codes. In detail, this learning process is supervised by a clothing matching matrix, which is initially constructed based on limited known matching pairs and subsequently on the self-augmented ones. The proposed model jointly learns the intrinsic matching patterns from the matching matrix and the binary representations from the clothing items’ images, where the visual feature of each clothing item is discretized into a fixed-length binary vector. The binary representation learning significantly reduces the memory cost and accelerates the recommendation speed. The experiments compared with several state-of-the-art approaches have evidenced the superior performance of the proposed approach on efficient fashion recommendation.