Wide Eyes Technologies re-works search by image in fashion retail during Re·Work London Summit
On June 1st and 2nd, London will become the European capital of Deep Learning, the next revolution in artificial intelligence. It’s the centre point that will bring together the main players in this sector -researchers, data scientists, engineers, CTOs, startups, CEOs and leading retailers-, to explore the latest deep learning advancements and methods to improve advertising and the retail experience.
The Deep Learning in Retail & Advertising Summit has an expert panel (Asos, Amazon, Zalando, etc.) that will discuss the impact of deep learning and AI in business and industry. During the event, Arnau Ramisa, Senior Research Engineer at Wide Eyes Technologies, will address one of the biggest challenges fashion retailers who decided to bet on visual search are facing: Fashion Product Retrieval with Real World Images.
Visual search allows for customers to discover fashion instead of flipping through endless pages of text based searches. In this sense, AI technology gives brands the ultimate tools to be able to give their customers instant and easy access to what they want— the trends they see in social media, the photos they take themselves with their phones of people on the street, screenshotting instagram or a pic of an advert, and allows them to find what they love and buy it now. This is making AI technology a mainstream solution and a necessary investment for fashion retailers.
When this theory is applied in practice, some challenges and difficulties arise. The images which users use to do an image search are not as optimal as the typical image an ecommerce has for their products. Catalog images are taken by professional photographers in ideal conditions, often with a white background, while “query pictures” are much more diverse and can have many undesirable characteristics such as bad illumination, motion blur, complex backgrounds or unusual viewpoints.
To bridge this gap, Arnau Ramisa will explain how Wide Eyes Technologies has successfully overcome this difficulty by being able to do a search using real world images. Thanks to Siamese networks, Wide Eyes Technologies can offer fashion retailers an amazing visual shopping experience for their customers: discover fashion with a single snap. After all, capturing images with smartphones has turned into a ‘habit’ and inspiration, when referring to fashion, always has its starting point in an image.
