Semi- Supervised and Fully Supervised Learning for Fashion Images : A Comparison Study

Abstract: Image recognition is a subfield in computer vision, representing a set of methods for analyzing images. Image recognition systems allow computers to automatically find patterns and draw conclusions directly from images. The recent growth of the ecommerce fashion industry has sparked an increased interest from research community, and subsequently industry participants have started to apply image recognition technologies to automate various processes and applications like clothing categorization, attribute tagging, automatic product recommendations and many more. However, most research have been concerned with supervised learning, which require large labeled datasets. This thesis investigates an alternative approach which could potentially mitigate the reliance of large labeled datasets. Specifically, it investigates how Semi- Supervised Learning (SSL) compares to supervised learning in the context of fashion category classification. This thesis demonstrates that a state- of- the- art SSL method to train Deep Convolutional Neural Networks can provide very close accuracy to supervised learning by a margin of approximately 1 to 3 percent for the considered set of images.