Pinterest Roll out Skin Tone Filter in Quest for a “More Inclusive Way to Search”
Pinterest has over the years morphed into a platform with
rather specific uses which are fairly consistent across much of their 200
million-strong user base. It is arguably most often used as a source of
inspiration for endeavours such as livening up your cooking or perfecting your
hair and beauty routine, with a study conducted by Pinterest themselves showing
that 70% of their users search the platform to discover and save various looks
and styles.
Hair and beauty tips feature prominently on the site and
many influential fashion bloggers maintain a presence on the platform, but with
so much imagery flooding the platform it can be difficult to find exactly what
you are looking for. Apparently, one oft-reported difficulty relates to finding
makeup and beauty products that correspond to a specific person’s skin tone, as
many brands now specialise their products in such a way to ensure a better
match.
In an effort to help in this regard, Pinterest engineer
Laksh Bhasin announced in a recent Medium post that the platform will begin rolling out the beta
version of a new search feature which enables users to refine results according
to a given skin tone range. This filter is only available on searchers relating
to specific beauty terms for rather obvious reasons.
With any feature such as this privacy was bound to be a concern;
one which Pinterest have addressed by assuring their users that no information
will be stored as a result of these searches. The slight downside of this is
that you will have to select a skin tone range for each individual search, but
it does mean that you are free from targeted ads and data-mining stemming from
your use of the feature.
So how exactly does this work? Detecting a skin tone within
an image is problematic to begin with, as variables such as lighting, shadows,
prominence and blurriness may all create inaccuracies. Human evaluation would
of course be the most reliable solution, but by the company’s own admission
there is simply too much content on the platform to make this a viable option. Instead,
Pinterest turned their attention to a method that works at scale; namely machine
learning.
Making use of a third-party Face AI library from ModiFace, a company specialising
in augmented reality and machine learning for beauty applications, alongside
deep neural networks, the development team were able to produce successive
algorithms for skin tone detection. Pinterest then passed results through their
own human evaluation platform, named Sophia, in order to gather additional data
and further perfect the machine learning algorithm ahead of launch.
For now the feature is limited to just four skin tone ranges;
however the company plans to expand these ranges moving forward.
“As new Pins are added to the system, we incrementally run
the skin tone detection algorithm on just those new Pins, so we continue to
increase our coverage of skin tone data and improve results,” wrote Mr Bhasin.
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Pinterest Roll out Skin Tone Filter in Quest for a “More Inclusive Way to Search”
Reviewed by Unknown
on
Friday, April 27, 2018
Rating:
Reviewed by Unknown
on
Friday, April 27, 2018
Rating:
Unknown
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