Memory-Augmented Attribute Manipulation Networks for Interactive Fashion Search

Bo Zhao, Jiashi Feng, Xiao Wu, Shuicheng Yan; Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2017, pp. 1520-1528

We introduce a new fashion search protocol where attribute manipulation is allowed within the interaction between users and search engines, e.g. manipulating the color attribute of the clothing from red to blue. It is particularly useful for image-based search when the query image cannot perfectly match user's expectation of the desired product. To build such a search engine, we propose a novel memory-augmented Attribute Manipulation Network (AMNet) which can manipulate image representation at the attribute level. Given a query image and some attributes that need to modify, AMNet can manipulate the intermediate representation encoding the unwanted attributes and change them to the desired ones through following four novel components: (1) a dual-path CNN architecture for discriminative deep attribute representation learning; (2) a memory block with an internal memory and a neural controller for prototype attribute representation learning and hosting; (3) an attribute manipulation network to modify the representation of the query image with the prototype feature retrieved from the memory block; (4) a loss layer which jointly optimizes the attribute classification loss and a triplet ranking loss over triplet images for facilitating precise attribute manipulation and image retrieving. Extensive experiments conducted on two large-scale fashion search datasets, i.e. DARN and DeepFashion, have demonstrated that AMNet is able to achieve remarkably good performance compared with well-designed baselines in terms of effectiveness of attribute manipulation and search accuracy.