Monthly Archives: March 2017

Fashion fingerprint is a compact feature vector for fashion items that can be used for tasks such as recognition, clustering, and retrieval of similar items. It is equally useful for both online fashion retailers as well as for physical apparel stores (with or without their online extensions). A related problem is understanding the apparel preferences of an individual from the dresses that they wear while visiting the physical store. One of the challenges of fashion study different from others is lack of enough accurate annotation. Available datasets have either limited number of images or very noisy annotation.

Currently we have successfully trained a fashion item localization model based on SSD[1]. The model is able to localize upper clothes, bottom clothes and one-pieces and has been tested on the Clothing Parsing dataset[2]. It achieves an F-score of 0.887 on upper clothes localization. For other clothing items, errors occur because the model may focus on too local regions and thus gets confused between skirt and dress. Prior location of human body will be incorporated in our model to solve this problem.

In the future we will further refine our localization model and also work on two directions. One is to recognize the garments based on our localization. The other one is to automatically label more images to enlarge the size of datasets.

[1] Liu, Wei, et al. “SSD: Single shot multibox detector.” European Conference on Computer Vision. Springer International Publishing, 2016.
[2] Liang, Xiaodan, et al. “Deep human parsing with active template regression.” IEEE transactions on pattern analysis and machine intelligence 37.12 (2015): 2402-2414.

MCL Director, Professor C.-C. Jay Kuo, received the 2017 IEEE Leon K. Kirchmayer Graduate Teaching Award on March 6 at the 42nd IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP) held in New Orleans, Louisiana, USA.

The IEEE Leon K. Kirchmayer Graduate Teaching Award is sponsored by the Leon K. Kirchmayer Memorial Fund and recognizes inspirational teaching of graduate students in the IEEE fields of interest.  Professor Kuo received this award for excellence in inspirational guidance of graduate students and curriculum development in the area of multimedia signal processing.

Professor Kuo gave the following short speech in the Award Ceremony. “It was a great honor to be recognized by the prestigious Lion K. Kirchmayer Graduate Teaching Award. I would like to use this opportunity to appreciate a few people who had great impacts on my teaching career. When I was a PhD student at MIT, I was fortunate to work with a few young faculty members. They were my PhD and Master thesis advisor Bernard Levy, my PhD thesis co-advisor, John Tsitsiklis, my MS thesis co-advisor, Bruce Musicus, my PhD thesis committee member, Nick Trefethen, and my postdoc mentor at UCLA, Tony Chan. They spent an enormous amount of time nurturing and advising me. I am obliged to them deeply. Furthermore, I would like to say thanks to my graduate students. They are not only my students but also my teachers. I learned many new topics together with them. Finally, I would like to give thanks to my wife and daughter. Their unconditional love and patience allow me to do whatever I want to pursue. I do owe them tremendously, and would to like to share my joy and honor with them.”

Congratulations to Professor [...]