Unposed: Unsupervised Pose Estimation based Product Image Recommendations

TL;DR

This paper introduces an unsupervised human pose detection method to identify missing or repeated product images in e-commerce listings, aiming to improve product presentation and customer experience at scale.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel unsupervised approach for pose-based image quality assessment in product catalogs, reducing bias and enabling large-scale monitoring.

Findings

High prevalence of missing or repeated images in sampled products

Model can identify missing pose variants effectively

Potential for large-scale application in e-commerce platforms

Abstract

Product images are the most impressing medium of customer interaction on the product detail pages of e-commerce websites. Millions of products are onboarded on to webstore catalogues daily and maintaining a high quality bar for a product's set of images is a problem at scale. Grouping products by categories, clothing is a very high volume and high velocity category and thus deserves its own attention. Given the scale it is challenging to monitor the completeness of image set, which adequately details the product for the consumers, which in turn often leads to a poor customer experience and thus customer drop off. To supervise the quality and completeness of the images in the product pages for these product types and suggest improvements, we propose a Human Pose Detection based unsupervised method to scan the image set of a product for the missing ones. The unsupervised approach suggests a fair approach to sellers based on product and category irrespective of any biases. We first create a reference image set of popular products with wholesome imageset. Then we create clusters of images to label most desirable poses to form the classes for the reference set from these ideal products set. Further, for all test products we scan the images for all desired pose classes w.r.t. reference set poses, determine the missing ones and sort them in the order of potential impact. These missing poses can further be used by the sellers to add enriched product listing image. We gathered data from popular online webstore and surveyed ~200 products manually, a large fraction of which had at least 1 repeated image or missing variant, and sampled 3K products(~20K images) of which a significant proportion had scope for adding many image variants as compared to high rated products which had more than double image variants, indicating that our model can potentially be used on a large scale.