Sparsity took part of the SOMATCH EU project under the Horizon 2020 programme. The main objective of the project was the improvement of the competitiveness of European SMEs dedicated to fashion design and Textile & Clothing (T&C) sectors by providing an IT solution that handed over to creative designers detailed and reliable fashion trends estimations and forecasts of user acceptance for clothing designs.
This was achieved with the creation of an innovative tool for the mining and visualization of large sets of unstructured data, regarding the use and preferences of fashion products by consumers, supporting T&C companies quick reaction to the market dynamics and better adaptation of design to real consumers’ demand.
SOMATCH faced its complex and challenging deal by the combined development and application of SoA advanced image analysis technology- unexploited and innovative in clothing and fashion- combined with social network analysis.
The visualisation of the generated data was performed from off-line statistics, generated after data processing, and by new real-time instruments for image collection and designs evaluation.
They were targeted also by the integration of the systems with new SoA mobile devices to collect information and to visualise trend interpretation.
This approach opened a vast field of new approaches for the fashion designers, supporting end users involvement into the whole trend evaluation and a close interaction with them.
Sparsity’s role in the project is to provide the Social Networks Analysis to detect influential trendsetters powered by Sparksee high-performance graph database management system.
Other project partners include research centres focused on image and content analysis (Technical University of Munich, UPC-Barcelonatech), software providers with expertise in the fashion industry and platform development (iDeal, Holonix), end users from SME textile industry and retail (Dena Cashmere) and fashion-related social networking and e-commerce sites owners (Weblogs, Not Just a Label).