Hybrid Style Siamese Network: Incorporating style loss in complimentary apparels retrieval

Image Retrieval grows to be an integral part of fashion e-commerce ecosystem as it keeps expanding in multitudes. Other than the retrieval of visually similar items, the retrieval of visually compatible or complimentary items is also an important aspect of it. Normal Siamese Networks tend to work well on complimentary items retrieval. But it fails to identify low level style features which make items compatible in human eyes. These low level style features are captured to a large extent in techniques used in neural style transfer. This paper proposes a mechanism of utilising those methods in this retrieval task and capturing the low level style features through a hybrid siamese network coupled with a hybrid loss. The experimental results indicate that the proposed method outperforms traditional siamese networks in retrieval tasks for complimentary items.