Structure-Aware Deep Learning for Product Image Classification

Automatic product image classification is a task of crucial importance with respect to the management of online retailers. Motivated by recent advancements of deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) on image classification, in this work we revisit the problem in the context of product images with the existence of a predefined categorical hierarchy and attributes, aiming to leverage the hierarchy and attributes to improve classification accuracy. With these structure-aware clues, we argue that more advanced deep models could be developed beyond the flat one-versus-all classification performed by conventional CNNs. To this end, novel efforts of this work include a salient-sensitive CNN that gazes into the product foreground by inserting a dedicated spatial attention module; a multiclass regression-based refinement that is expected to predict more accurately by merging prediction scores from multiple preceding CNNs, each corresponding to a distinct classifier in the hierarchy; and a multitask deep learning architecture that effectively explores correlations among categories and attributes for categorical label prediction. Experimental results on nearly 1 million real-world product images basically validate the effectiveness of the proposed efforts individually and jointly, from which performance gains are observed.