Class-based color bag of words for fashion retrieval

Color signatures, histograms and bag of colors are basic and effective strategies for describing the color content of images, for retrieving images by their color appearance or providing color annotation. In some domains, colors assume a specific meaning for users and the color-based classification and retrieval should mirror the initial suggestions given by users in the training set. For instance in fashion world, the names given to the dominant color of a garment or a dress reflect the fashion dictact and not an uniform division of the color space.In this paper we propose a general approach to implement color signature as a trained bag of words, defined on the basis of user defined color classes. The novel Class-based Color Bag of Words is a easy computable bag of words of color, constructed following an approach similar to the Median Cut algorithm, but biased by color distribution in the trained classes. Moreover, to dramatically reduce the computational effort we propose 3D integral histograms, a 3D extension of integral images, easily extensible for many histogram-based signature in 3D color space. Several comparisons in large fashion datasets confirm the discriminant power of this signature.