In this chapter, we will make use of the Keras and EBImage libraries:

# Libraries
library(keras)
library(EBImage)

Let's get started by looking at some images downloaded from the internet. There are 20 images that include fashion articles such as shirts, bags, sandals, dresses, and others. These images were obtained using a Google search. We will try to develop an image recognition and classification model that recognizes these images and classifies them in appropriate categories. And to develop such a model, we will make use of the fashion-MNIST database of fashion articles:

# Read data
setwd("~/Desktop/image20")
temp = list.files(pattern = "*.jpg")
mypic <- list()
for (i in 1:length(temp))  {mypic[[i]] <- readImage(temp[[i]])}
par(mfrow = c(5,4))
for (i in 1:length(temp)) plot(mypic[[i]])

The 20 images of fashion items downloaded from the internet are shown as follows:

Next, let's look at the fashion-MNIST data that contains a much larger collection of images of such fashion items.