Learning Fashion Similarity Based on Hierarchical Attribute Embedding

Embedding items directly into a common feature space, and then measuring the similarity by calculating the feature distance in this space, has become the main method for similarity learning in current fashion retrieval tasks. The method is simple and efficient, but it ignores the correlation among fashion attributes and the impact of these correlations on the feature space, thereby reducing the accuracy of retrieval. Since the number of fashion attributes is large and the semantic granularity is also different, how to capture the relationship between fashion attributes and perform refined embedding to accurately represent fashion items is a challenge. In this paper, by constructing an attribute tree, we propose a hierarchical attribute embedding method for representing fashion items to enhance the relationship between attributes and use masking technology to disentangle different attributes. Based on these modules, we propose a hierarchical attribute-aware embedding network (HAEN) which takes images and attributes as input, learns multiple attribute-specific embedding spaces, and measures fine-grained similarity in the corresponding spaces. The extensive experimental result on two fashion-related public datasets FashionAI and DARN shows the superiority (+5.11% and +3.09% in MAP, respectively) of our proposed HAEN compared with state-of-the-art methods.