Learning to Synthesize Compatible Fashion Items Using Semantic Alignment and Collocation Classification: An Outfit Generation Framework

The field of fashion compatibility learning has attracted great attention from both the academic and industrial communities in recent years. Many studies have been carried out for fashion compatibility prediction, collocated outfit recommendation, artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled compatible fashion design, and related topics. In particular, AI-enabled compatible fashion design can be used to synthesize compatible fashion items or outfits to improve the design experience for designers or the efficacy of recommendations for customers. However, previous generative models for collocated fashion synthesis have generally focused on the image-to-image translation between fashion items of upper and lower clothing. In this article, we propose a novel outfit generation framework, i.e., OutfitGAN, with the aim of synthesizing a set of complementary items to compose an entire outfit, given one extant fashion item and reference masks of target synthesized items. OutfitGAN includes a semantic alignment module (SAM), which is responsible for characterizing the mapping correspondence between the existing fashion items and the synthesized ones, to improve the quality of the synthesized images, and a collocation classification module (CCM), which is used to improve the compatibility of a synthesized outfit. To evaluate the performance of our proposed models, we built a large-scale dataset consisting of 20 000 fashion outfits. Extensive experimental results on this dataset show that our OutfitGAN can synthesize photo-realistic outfits and outperform the state-of-the-art methods in terms of similarity, authenticity, and compatibility measurements.