An Effective Pipeline for a Real-world Clothes Retrieval System

In this paper, we propose an effective pipeline for clothes retrieval system which has sturdiness on large-scale real-world fashion data. Our proposed method consists of three components: detection, retrieval, and post-processing. We firstly conduct a detection task for precise retrieval on target clothes, then retrieve the corresponding items with the metric learning-based model. To improve the retrieval robustness against noise and misleading bounding boxes, we apply post-processing methods such as weighted boxes fusion and feature concatenation. With the proposed methodology, we achieved 2nd place in the DeepFashion2 Clothes Retrieval 2020 challenge.

Combination of Multiple Global Descriptors for Image Retrieval

Recent studies in image retrieval task have shown that ensembling different models and combining multiple global descriptors lead to performance improvement. However, training different models for ensemble is not only difficult but also inefficient with respect to time or memory. In this paper, we propose a novel framework that exploits multiple global descriptors to get an ensemble-like effect while it can be trained in an end-to-end manner. The proposed framework is flexible and expandable by the global descriptor, CNN backbone, loss, and dataset. Moreover, we investigate the effectiveness of combining multiple global descriptors with quantitative and qualitative analysis. Our extensive experiments show that the combined descriptor outperforms a single global descriptor, as it can utilize different types of feature properties. In the benchmark evaluation, the proposed framework achieves the state-of-the-art performance on the CARS196, CUB200-2011, In-shop Clothes and Stanford Online Products on image retrieval tasks by a large margin compared to competing approaches.