In my last post, “artificial intelligence in fashion (part one: brainstorming)“, I produced a list of big ideas on how machine learning and artificial intelligence may be applied to the fashion industry. I addressed sizing, marketing, and design activities when brainstorming this list.
This post doesn’t specifically cover an artificial intelligence solution, but it lays groundwork that I need in place to get to an AI-based style recommendation engine based on body shapes that I’d like to build. Essentially, most fashion dictums take the form of IF-THEN-ELSE rules, where the IF clause generally starts with specifying one’s body shape.
So I needed a way for many individuals at once to determine their body shape, which led to creation of a web-based calculator, pictured below. Several of these already exist, but I really needed my own for my AI project for the following reasons:
- I can include this work into larger AI software pipelines.
- Cannot easily include others’ tools, by comparison.
- I understand the computational method behind what I’m offering.
- Others’ tools are black boxes.
- The computation method I used comes from academic literature, so it is peer-reviewed.
- I can show ads to users to generate some cash flow.
Here is a picture of the web-application I created for this task:
