With online shopping becoming a big reality during the COVID pandemic, amazon is planning an Artificial Intelligence-based virtual shopping service which is being called Outfit-VITON as per documents from a presentation planned for the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), VentureBeat reports.
The service would be multi-layered and work through different algorithms approach.
The first algorithm will be used to hone search queries by describing variations on a product image, and another algorithm will suggest items that match with things a customer has already picked out. The third algorithm will synthesize an image of a model wearing clothes from the user’s search, which will show the way the clothes work as a complete outfit in real-time to the prospective customer.
Amazon’s hardware facility and its research team which is called Lab 125 — which in past has put out products like Fire TV, Kindle Fire, and Echo has developed a virtual try-on system, called Outfit-VITON.
This technology will attempt to portray what an outfit might look like on an image of a person. The system will utilize a generative adversarial network (GAN), which allows for the distinguishing of a generated item from a real image, says Amazon.
“Online shopping does not enable physical try-on, thereby limiting customer understanding of how a garment will actually look on them,” the researchers wrote. “This critical limitation encouraged the development of virtual fitting rooms, where images of a customer wearing selected garments are generated synthetically to help compare and choose the most desired look.”
Outfit-VITON will perform by using a shape-generation model that uses a template for the final image — and however multiple reference images a user wants to provide. The program will then do its best estimation of the user’s body type, shape, and color, to provide as close a guess as possible as to how an outfit would look on them in real life.
Online clothes shopping would be a convenient new way to go about it, but the overall effect would be limiting. said the researchers.
This seems to be the inherent flaw as compared to real-time actual shopping, claim the skeptics.
Innovators looking for new ways of shopping are continuing to experiment with new things and Amazon’s ideas are in-line with others as AI and Augmented Reality in shopping are here to stay.
