This repository contains my work for team Maverick in DSC at University of Texas at Dallas. All code contained in this repository is my own (excluding libraries). I plan to halt this project for a while (since team members have all quit due to lack of time) and might revisit it during the summer. I have now posted it on Github with public permissions so that others may benefit.
This project is an effort to predict fashion trends over time using machine learning. Currently, I am able to classify different types of clothing (Shirts, Skirts, Pants, Dress) using images webscraped from chictopia.com and training a model built using Keras.
How could this project be useful? Being able to predict fashion trends would allow retailers to better their logistics for storage/shipping of clothes. Right now, retailers use sales along with results from fashion shows/blogs to determine what clothes would be useful for fashion. This project could add a new dimension of analytics for such retailers (being able to use social media to predict demand possibly).
Currently, this project is split into several files to make prototyping easier. Current workflow:
webscraper.py --> csvDownload.py --> preprocessing.py --> FashionTrends.py
webscraper.py webscrapes chictopia.com for images and tags. csvDownload.py actually downloads the scraped images which are fed into preprocessing.py to perform image preprocessing. Finally, FashionTrends.py is run to actually train the model.
I use BeautifulSoup to parse webpages. Then, I download the images and start preprocessing.
If preprocessing.py started with this image:
I remove the background (everything but humans) using DeepLabv3+.
After removing the background, I then resize the image and perform k-means clustering using KMeans from Scikit-learn. Number of clusters currently is 4.
Finally, I save the resized image along with a 2D NumPy array where each 2D location is the corresponding cluster value at that location based on cluster size and starting at 0 for largest cluster. This is then used for training.
FashionTrends.py first creates a pandas dataset using the CSVs from webscraping.py and then constructs a 3D numpy array of the arrays created from preprocessing.py. After this, training occurs.
My current model is a CNN with 2 convolutional layers and 2 dropout layers followed by a softmax layer. Optimizer is Adadelta. For specifics, look at (/FashionTrends/FashionTrends.py#L99).
Result after training:
These results are pretty good considering a small and potentially noisy dataset (~1200 images). For further improvements, I might use a GAN (Generational-Adversarial Network) which has been proven to do better for fashion classification and add more images to the dataset.
Disclaimer: I am not a professional (yet). For any other newbies who stumble upon this repository, don't treat these results as guarenteed good nor the methodology I used - there might be better alternatives I just don't have experience in yet.