VP-Rec: A Hybrid Image Recommender Using Visual Perception Network

A requirement for a great user experience is to meet the exact needs for the usage of a recommender system. Such systems need user's historical preferences to reasonably perform, which might not be the case for a cold-start user. This paper presents VP-Rec, a hybrid image recommender system that addresses the new user cold-start problem. VP-Rec combines user visual perception and pairwise preferences as source of information to perform recommendations. First, we infer pairwise preferences from users ratings. Next, we build visual perception networks linking users according to their visual attention similarities. From these two inferred structures, we build consensual prediction models, so that when a new user enters the system, we capture his visual attention and choose the best model that fits him. The system has been tested on two image datasets, getting important improvements in terms of ranking quality (nDCG) when applied to new user cold-start scenario against state-of-art recommender systems.