Human body shape, which describes the contours of the body figure as well as the distribution of muscles and fat, contains a rich source of information, from health issues to aesthetic presentation of fashion styles. However, most of the existing methods for estimating body types are derived from subjective measures, which are susceptible to multiple biases. Determining the type of body shapes is still a challenging analytical task, for which open questions remain regarding good feature representation and classification methods, given noisy and imbalanced real-world data. In this work, we propose a novel body type recognition framework based on anthropometric measurements, which integrates label filtering and pseudo-feature synthesis modules. Label filtering is proposed to identify and filter out potentially noisy labels during classifier training, while pseudo-feature is generated to improve feature representation. Experimental results on the collected dataset from online feeds demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach compared to the state-of-the-art baselines.

Body shape is about proportion, and fashion style is all about dressing those proportions to look their very best. Figuring out the styles to suit a body shape can be a daunting task for many people. It is, therefore, essential to develop a framework for learning the compatibility of body shapes and clothing styles. Though fashion designers and fashion stylists have analyzed the correlation between human body shapes and fashion styles for a long time, this issue did not receive much attention in multimedia science. In this paper, we present a novel style recommender, on the basis of the user's body attributes. The rich amount of fashion styling knowledge from social big data is exploited for this purpose. We first construct a joint embedding of clothing styles and human body measurements with deep multimodal representation learning on a reference dataset that has been sorted to meet the fashion rules. We then discover the relevant semantic features by propagation and selection in clothing style and body shape graphs. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework when compared with several baseline methods.

Clothing is an integral part of life. Also, it is always an uneasy task for people to make decisions on what to wear. An essential style tip is to dress for the body shape, i.e., knowing one's own body shape (e.g., hourglass, rectangle, round and inverted triangle) and selecting the types of clothes that will accentuate the body's good features. In the literature, although various fashion recommendation systems for clothing items have been developed, none of them had explicitly taken the user's basic body shape into consideration. In this paper, therefore, we proposed a first framework for learning the compatibility of clothing styles and body shapes from social big data, with the goal to recommend a user about what to wear better in relation to his/her essential body attributes. The experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our proposed approach, leading to a new aspect for research into fashion recommendation.

According to the theory of clothing design, the genres of clothes can be recognized based on a set of visually differentiable style elements, which exhibit salient features of visual appearance and reflect high-level fashion styles for better describing clothing genres. Instead of using less-discriminative low-level features or ambiguous keywords to identify clothing genres, we proposed a novel approach for automatically classifying clothing genres based on the visually differentiable style elements. A set of style elements, that are crucial for recognizing specific visual styles of clothing genres, were identified based on the clothing design theory. In addition, the corresponding salient visual features of each style element were identified and formulated with variables that can be computationally derived with various computer vision algorithms. To evaluate the performance of our algorithm, a dataset containing 3250 full-body shots crawled from popular online stores was built. Recognition results show that our proposed algorithms achieved promising overall precision, recall, and -score of 88.76%, 88.53%, and 88.64% for recognizing upperwear genres, and 88.21%, 88.17%, and 88.19% for recognizing lowerwear genres, respectively. The effectiveness of each style element and its visual features on recognizing clothing genres was demonstrated through a set of experiments involving different sets of style elements or features. In summary, our experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in clothing genre recognition.

Social media websites have become an important channel for content sharing and communication between users on social networks. The shared images on the websites, even the ones from the same user, tend to receive a quite diverse distribution of views. This raises the problem of image popularity prediction on social media. To address this important research topic, we explore three essential components that have considerable impact of the image popularity, which are user profile, post metadata, and photo aesthetics. Moreover, we make use of state-of-the-art predictive modeling approaches to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed features in predicting image popularity. We then evaluate the proposed method through a large number of real image posts from Flickr. The experimental results show significant statistical evidence that incorporating the proposed features with ensemble learning method that combines predictions from support vector regression (SVR) and classification and regression tree (CART) models offers a satisfactory popularity prediction. By understanding the social behavior and the underlying structure of content popularity, our research results can also contribute to designing better algorithms for important applications like content recommendation and advertisement placement.

Fashion is a reflection of the society of a period. Given that New York City is one of the world's fashion capitals, understanding its change in fashion becomes a way to know the society and the times. To keep up with fashion trends, it is important to know what's " in" and what's "out" for a season. Though the fashion trends have been analyzed by fashion designers and fashion analysts for a long time, this issue has been ignored in multimedia science. In this paper, we present a novel algorithm that automatically discovers visual style elements representing fashion trends for a certain season. The visual style elements are discovered based on the stylistic coherent and unique characteristics. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method through a large number of catwalk show videos.

This paper presents a novel approach to automatically classify the upperwear genre from a full-body input image with no restrictions of model poses, image backgrounds, and image resolutions. Five style elements, that are crucial for clothing recognition, are identified based on the clothing design theory. The corresponding features of each of these style elements are also designed. We illustrate the effectiveness of our approach by showing that the proposed algorithm achieved overall precision of 92.04%, recall of 92.45%, and F score of 92.25% with 1,077 clothing images crawled from popular online stores.