about
Miss Universe and Automatic Prediction for the Evening Gown Competition (arxiv.org)
1 point by who8mylunch on Apr 30, 2016 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: A system scores evening gown catwalk videos to guess the Miss Universe winner, tested on ten years of competitions from 1996 to 2010. Instead of human fashion experts' impressions, it ranked the real winner in its top three in 5 of the 10 shows.

Abstract · Towards Miss Universe Automatic Prediction: The Evening Gown Competition

Can we predict the winner of Miss Universe after watching how they stride down the catwalk during the evening gown competition? Fashion gurus say they can! In our work, we study this question from the perspective of computer vision. In particular, we want to understand whether existing computer vision approaches can be used to automatically extract the qualities exhibited by the Miss Universe winners during their catwalk. This study can pave the way towards new vision-based applications for the fashion industry. To this end, we propose a novel video dataset, called the Miss Universe dataset, comprising 10 years of the evening gown competition selected between 1996-2010. We further propose two ranking-related problems: (1) Miss Universe Listwise Ranking and (2) Miss Universe Pairwise Ranking. In addition, we also develop an approach that simultaneously addresses the two proposed problems. To describe the videos we employ the recently proposed Stacked Fisher Vectors in conjunction with robust local spatio-temporal features. From our evaluation we found that although the addressed problems are extremely challenging, the proposed system is able to rank the winner in the top 3 best predicted scores for 5 out of 10 Miss Universe competitions.

Johanna Carvajal, Arnold Wiliem, Conrad Sanderson, Brian Lovell
arXiv:1604.07547 · cs.CV, cs.CY, cs.MM · submitted Apr 26, 2016 · updated Sep 12, 2016
abstract · pdf · html

add comment on HN