'Novel AI system can give you fashion advice'

Scientists have developed a new artificial intelligence (AI) system that can look at a picture of an outfit and suggest helpful tips to make it more fashionable.

The system, named Fashion++, uses visual recognition systems to analyse the colour, pattern, texture and shape of garments in an image, the researchers said.

It considers where edits will have the most impact, and then offers several alternative outfits to the user, they said.

"We thought of it like a friend giving you feedback. It's also motivated by a practical idea: that we can work with a given outfit to make small changes so it's just a bit better," said Kristen Grauman, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin in the US.

Fashion++ was trained using more than 10,000 images of outfits shared publicly on online sites for fashion enthusiasts.

Finding images of fashionable outfits was easy, said graduate student Kimberly Hsiao.

Finding unfashionable images proved challenging. She mixed images of fashionable outfits to create less-fashionable examples and trained the system on what not to wear.

"As fashion styles evolve, the AI can continue to learn by giving it new images, which are abundant on the internet," Hsiao said.

Grauman and Hsiao will present their approach at next week's International Conference on Computer Vision in Seoul, South Korea.

Researchers noted that like all AI systems, bias can creep in through the data sets for Fashion++.

They pointed out that vintage looks are harder to recognise as stylish because training images came from the internet, which has been in wide use only since the 1990s.

Since the users submitting images were mostly from North America, styles from other parts of the world don't show up as much, the researchers said.

Another challenge is that many images of fashionable clothes appear on models, but bodies come in many sizes and shapes, affecting fashion choices, they said.