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StileEye’s image-based search engine is a personal stylist in your pocket

Francis Bea
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stileeye

If you have a sartorial streak and love street fashion or window shopping, you might find yourself snapping shots, and then scouring through magazines and websites for similar styles. What if that process was whittled down to just a snap of a photo, followed by results?

StileEye is a powerful and intelligent search engine that ties the real world with the digital to help fashionistas find the styles they’re looking for – and sometimes on a budget. On the front end, the app is simple to use: Take a photo of any clothing item, whether it’s draped over a mannequin, worn by a passerby on the street, or even found in a magazine. StileEye’s algorithm will scour its database and find several articles of clothing that best match the apparel you’ve taken a photo of. The app can even recommend an accessory to match your outfit, and also enables users to purchase items that they’ve discovered on StileEye.

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So what powers StileEye? Discussing the platform’s infrastructure, its co-founder and VP of Technology, Sudhir Singh, says that the algorithm is able to match similar styles with 93 percent accuracy. Every detail about an article of clothing that you’ve taken a picture of is calculated and interpreted by the StileEye engine. It interprets and analyzes signals like the shape, design, pattern, color, length, and other criteria. It’s so powerful that the engine even works with identifying hair styles. Singh adds that the algorithm is constantly being refined and accuracy will increase since the engine boasts a machine learning algorithm that’s able to learn as more and more searches are made.

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To find similar styles, StileEye crawls the fashion and celebrity sections of the Web looking for the latest celebrity wear, as well as fashion publications including Glamour, Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue, and Style.com. All this gets fed into StileEye’s database called its “Universal Catalogue.” The database and algorithm combine to recognize and make sense of the data that it’s pulling from the Web. For example, using StileEye’s engine the co-founders have been able to figure out exactly what Kate Middleton’s style habits are. According to StileEye’s discoveries about Middleton include:

  • “She wears mostly shift dresses, coat dresses, and a-line flare dresses with simple cinched waist.
  • Popular sleeve styles are long to 3/4 sleeves.
  • Dress length and necklines are always modest (e.g. knee length or tea length).
  • Necklines are mostly crewneck, v-neck, or boat neck.
  • Popular colors are soft whites, emerald greens, muted blues, and bright to deep reds.
  • She mostly wears solid colors, lace sometimes, and almost no prints.”

Kate Middleton’s apparel is just one way StileEye’s algorithm is able to make sense of all of the photographic data that’s being fed into its database. You can think of it like a personal unbiased pocket-sized stylist that can suggest what’s hot and what’s not. And this trend-spotting feature is what it uses to recommend the latest styles. FYI, StileEye’s data says that lace and mesh dresses – particularly in black – are definitely in this season, at least until next month when Fashion Week starts up again.

You can check out a quick two minute video of the app in action below.

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