Furniture Style Compatibility Estimation by Multi-Branch Deep Siamese Network

As demands for understanding visual style among interior scenes increase, estimating style compatibility is becoming challenging. In particular, furniture styles are difficult to define due to their various elements, such as color and shape. As a result, furniture style is an ambiguous concept. To reduce ambiguity, Siamese networks have frequently been used to estimate style compatibility by adding various features that represent the style. However, it is still difficult to accurately represent a furniture’s style, even when using alternate features associated with the images. In this paper, we propose a new Siamese model that can learn from several furniture images simultaneously. Specifically, we propose a one-to-many ratio input method to maintain high performance even when inputs are ambiguous. We also propose a new metric for evaluating Siamese networks. The conventional metric, the area under the ROC curve (AUC), does not reveal the actual distance between styles. Therefore, the proposed metric quantitatively evaluates the distance between styles by using the distance between the embedding of each furniture image. Experiments show that the proposed model improved the AUC from 0.672 to 0.721 and outperformed the conventional Siamese model in terms of the proposed metric.