CUbRIK Fashion Trend Analysis: a Business Intelligence Application

CUbRIK Summer School 2014


CUbRIK Fashion Trends

Bringing innovation to SMEs in the Fashion market

Claudio Massari – Innovation Engineering srl


2-4/07/2014 CUbRIK Summer School 1

Agenda

Innovation Engineering

The Fashion domain

The rationale behind the application

The CUbRIK approach

Main challenges

Conclusion



Innovation Engineering

Private Italian SME

Specialisation in the design & development of advanced IT solutions supporting knowledge extraction and management within organizations

Main Clients: Large Corporation, SMEs, Public bodies;

Involved in several R&D European and National projects



The Fashion domain

The Fashion domain

Fashion is a multi-billion Euro industry

representing about 3% of the EU GDP

90% of the organisations are SMEs

The fashion domain is characterized by:

Strong investments in new processes, new materials, new products

High seasonability: quick adaptation to the market requirements



The rationale behind CUbRIK Fashion Trends

SMEs needs

SMEs are constantly seeking for innovative

products and new trends

Data for Trends Analysis are collected manually:

surveys, interviews

Expensive Analysis performed by specialized agencies

and consultants

Gathering of the data is expensive

Analising Trends is expensive



SMEs’ needs

Why doesn’t your company carry out trend analysis when planning new products



The rationale

Aim of the CUbRIK Fashion Trend

Supporting European SMEs in the fashion sector to:

Exploit the potential of the new technology

Spot trends as soon as they evolve

To identify potential customer preferences

Get feedback from and learn about the needs of fashion consumers.

To trigger new trends through open innovation with SME’s own target groups



CUbRIK Fashion Trend main features

Trend analysis

What may SMEs obtain?

Trend analysis based on:

Garment category

A sample image

Time and spatial constraints

Results obtained:

The most popular colors, textures

An insight on the most popular images

The best combination of colors

Need addressed:

Affordable Trend analysis

Spot of the most popular colors

for a garment




Create an outfit and ask feedback

What may SMEs obtain?

Create and test an outfit based on:

A sample image

A set of similar images

Time and spatial constraints

Results obtained:

Creating an outfit for further analysis

Feedback about the outfit from their

network

Need addressed:

Affordable perception of the customers feeling

Support for realising collections (producing, buying, distributing)


Ask for feedback

SMEs obtain to:

Test a garment based on:

A sample image

Results obtained:

Receiving feedback about the

garment from their network

Need addressed:

Testing new product

Affordable perception of the customers feeling

Support for realising collections

(producing buying, distributing)





The CUbRIK pillars

Human in the loop

Gathering users’ generated content

Adopting a mixed solution: automatic analysis and Human in the loop approach

User preferences identification of the from the Social Network

Results:

Detecting trends on user preferences basis

Multimedia search similarity supporting SMEs in feeling the market


Usage of mixed crowdsourcing resources:

Crowdworkers

Players of Games With A Purpose – GWAP

Social Network users (preferences) and SMEs’ network (feedback)

Rationale

The “human touch” enhances the results and carries out key tasks

The “human feeling” is crucial in the fashion sector:

SMEs require analysis based on human feeling


The CUbRIK Human in the loop approach



Gathering images

Usage of the user’s content: Social networks are a tangible resource: users generate large

amount of data

High usage of the Social Network and the games: in 2011, they were the 1st and 2nd online activities, surpassing email [Nielsen]

200k images are crawled each week in Twitter

Main issue

Mixed quality of the images

Affordable huge quantity of data for SMEs



The CUbRIK mixed approach

Software analysis + Human in the loop provide SMEs with: Better Image identification

Is this Fashion? Automatic crawling is not capable to answer

Enhancement of results

More precise feature analysis results

available for the Trend detection



The CUbRIK mixed approach

Just humans can correctly understand similarity:

Are these images similar? The human perception of the similarity «dimensions» provides

SMEs users with similarity point of view

Skirt length

Pattern

Cut

Trendiness

Casualness

Suitability for a type of weather

SMEs are provided with results enhanced by humans

Vergleichen von Kleidungsstücken

47

Ähneln sich die Röcke (Farbe, Schnitt, Länge, …)?



Gathering preferences

Users preferences on Twitter (based on users activities)

Users preferences from videos

(which are the preferred

keyframes?)

Gathering feedback from your customers’ network

Do you like this image or this outfit?

SMEs can rely on users/customers preferences



The main challenge

The main challenges in the Fashion trends detecting:

Generation of the dataset (identification of fashion images)

Identification of the garments

Analysis multimedia features (color, texture)

Popularity detection

Similarity identification

The CUbRIK Approach:

Crawling and human in the loop for filtering fashion images

Automatic and manual (GWAP) segmentations of the garments

Automatic processing of images (features extraction)

Popularity identified through users activities in Social networks

Human in the loop for similarity perception identification



Benefits Innovation potentials

Innovative tool providing SMEs with a affordable market trend analysis

User “fresh” based generated contents. Affordable

Easy detection of popular behaviours/trends and colour/texture by location/season

Identification of similarities and recommendations provision

SMEs (small actors in the fashion sector, B2C):

Get over budget constraints for wide market analysis

Switch from an analysis based on inner personnel experience to an affordable analysis based on their potential customers and trends

Large organizations (buyers, distributors, producers addressing general public)

Tackle the need of detect and pilot trends obtaining affordable results in order to manage production, buying and distribution

Obtain an additional/alternative tool to retrieve trend analysis;



THANKS!

CUbRIK Fashion Trend Analysis: a Business Intelligence Application

Technology

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