On Branded Handbag Recognition

Manufacturing branded handbags is a big business in the fashion world. Shoppers’ feedback showing photos of their purchased handbags in social networks or blogs is important for branding purposes. In this paper, we deal with handbag recognition. It is a challenging problem due to the inter-class style similarity and the intra-class color variation. We focus on developing discriminative representations of handbag style and color. For handbag style representation, two supervised mid-level patch selection procedures are proposed to select discriminative patches, regarding individual classes and pairwise classes. We also propose a low-level complementary feature, extracted from texture-enhanced mid-level patches, to capture the fine details of the mid-level patches. For handbag color representation, we propose to extract dominant color features to handle the illumination changes. The performance of our proposed method is evaluated on a newly built branded handbag dataset. The results show that our method performs favorably in recognizing handbags, with around
$10\%$
improvement in accuracy when compared with the existing fine-grained or generic object recognition methods.