On augmenting database schemas by latent visual attributes

Decision-making in our everyday lives is surrounded by visually important information. Fashion, housing, dating, food or travel are just a few examples. At the same time, most commonly used tools for information retrieval operate on relational and text-based search models which are well understood by end users, but unable to directly cover visual information contained in images or videos. Researcher communities have been trying to reveal the semantics of multimedia in the last decades with ever-improving results, dominated by the success of deep learning. However, this does not close the gap to relational retrieval model on its own and often rather solves a very specialized task like assigning one of pre-defined classes to each object within a closed application ecosystem. Retrieval models based on these novel techniques are difficult to integrate in existing application-agnostic environments built around relational databases, and therefore, they are not so widely used in the industry. In this paper, we address the problem of closing the gap between visual information retrieval and relational database model. We propose and formalize a model for discovering candidates for new relational attributes by analysis of available visual content. We design and implement a system architecture supporting the attribute extraction, suggestion and acceptance processes. We apply the solution in the context of e-commerce and show how it can be seamlessly integrated with SQL environments widely used in the industry. At last, we evaluate the system in a user study and discuss the obtained results.