Pedestrian color naming via convolutional neural network

Color serves as an important cue for many computer vision tasks. Nevertheless, obtaining accurate color description from images is non-trivial due to varying illumination conditions, view angles, and surface reflectance. This is especially true for the challenging problem of pedestrian description in public spaces. We made two contributions in this study: (1) We contribute a largescale pedestrian color naming dataset with 14,213 hand-labeled images. (2) We address the problem of assigning consistent color name to regions of single object’s surface. We propose an end-to-end, pixel-to-pixel convolutional neural network (CNN) for pedestrian color naming. We demonstrate that our Pedestrian Color Naming CNN (PCN-CNN) is superior over existing approaches in providing consistent color names on real-world pedestrian images. In addition, we show the effectiveness of color descriptor extracted from PCN-CNN in complementing existing descriptors for the task of person re-identification. Moreover, we discuss a novel application to retrieve outfit matching and fashion (which could be difficult to be described by keywords) with just a user-provided color sketch.