Furniture-geek: Understanding fine-grained furniture attributes from freely associated text and tags

As the amount of user generated content on the internet grows, it becomes ever more important to come up with vision systems that learn directly from weakly annotated and noisy data. We leverage a large scale collection of user generated content comprising of images, tags and title/captions of furniture inventory from an e-commerce website to discover and categorize learnable visual attributes. Furniture categories have long been the quintessential example of why computer vision is hard, and we make one of the first attempts to understand them through a large scale weakly annotated dataset. We focus on a handful of furniture categories that are associated with a large number of fine-grained attributes. We propose a set of localized feature representations built on top of state-of-the-art computer vision representations originally designed for fine-grained object categorization. We report a thorough empirical characterization on the visual identifiability of various fine-grained attributes using these representations and show encouraging results on finding iconic images and on multi-attribute prediction.