The fine-grained variations in product images are usually due to slight variations in text, size, and color of the package. Both marginal variations in image content and illumination poses an important challenge in product classification. This disclosure relates to a system and method for fine-grained classification of similar-looking products utilizing object-level and part-level information. The system simultaneously captures an object-level and part-level information of the product. The object-level classification score of the product is estimated with the trained RC-Net, a deep supervised convolutional autoencoder. For annotation-free modelling of part-level information of the product the discriminative part-proposal of the product is identified around the BRISK key points. An ordered sequence of the discriminative part-proposals and the product image, encoded using stacked convolutional LSTM network, estimates the part-level classification score. Finally, the trained RC-Net and stacked conv-LSTM network jointly classifies the product image based on the final classification score.
FINE-GRAINED CLASSIFICATION OF RETAIL PRODUCTS