Robo Bill Cunningham: Shazam for Fashion With Deep Neural Networks -- Machine Intelligence Report

Without a doubt, Bill Cunningham has an incredible ability for discerning clothing. One may wonder how he got that way. On top of being quite gifted, someone like Bill must have also taken notice of a lot of outfits throughout his 60-year career as a photographer. Assuming Bill works every day of the year (which isn't a bad approximation) and shoots 10 outfits an hour for 8 hours a day, that number is well over a million. Here's the motivating question: If we presented the same number of clothing images to an artificial neural network, can it learn to see the world of fashion like Bill Cunningham does? Said in a less sensationalized way, what we're proposing is training a neural network to recognize clothing from images and find us visually similar ones.