Color Counting for Fashion, Art, and Design

Color modelling and extraction is an important topic in fashion, art, and design. Recommender systems, color-based retrieval, decorating, and fashion design can benefit from color extraction tools. Research has shown that modeling color so that it can be automatically analyzed and / or extracted is a difficult task. Unlike machines, color perception, although very subjective, is much simpler for humans. That being said, the first step in color modeling is to estimate the number of colors in the item / object. This is because color models can take advantage of the number of colors as the seed for better modelling, e.g., to make color extraction further deterministic. We aim in this work to develop and test models that can count the number of colors of clothing and other items. We propose a novel color counting method based on cumulative color histogram, which stands out among other methods. We compare the method we propose with other methods that utilize exhaustive color search that uses Gaussian Mixture Models (GMMs) and K-Means as bases for scoring the optimal number of colors, in addition to another method that relies on deep learning models. Unfortunately, the GMM, K-Means, and Deep Learning models all fail to accurately capture the number of colors. Our proposed method can provide the color baseline that can be used in AI-based fashion applications, and can also find applications in other areas, for example, interior design. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first of its kind that addresses the problem of color-counting machine.