Evaluating the Robustness of Virtual Try-On Models to African Textile Patterns and Garment Structures
# AfriVTON-Bench
**Evaluating the Robustness of Virtual Try-On Models to African Textile Patterns and Garment Structures**
*Testimony Adekoya · Shiloh Oni*
---
## Summary
State-of-the-art Virtual Try-On (VTON) models are trained on datasets dominated by Western casual wear. This work investigates whether these models generalise to garments with **high-frequency textile patterns** and **voluminous non-Western silhouettes** — properties that stress-test known weaknesses in current VTON pipelines.
We proceed in two stages:
1. **Representation audit** — examine how existing VTON datasets (VITON-HD, DressCode, DeepFashion) represent garments with dense textile patterns and non-Western garment structures.
2. **Benchmark evaluation** — introduce AfriVTON-Bench and evaluate 4 SOTA VTON models zero-shot, measuring how synthesis quality degrades as pattern complexity and structural difference increase.
African traditional attire — Ankara, Kente, Agbada, Boubou, and related garments — provides the primary test distribution because these garments systematically exhibit the visual properties that challenge current architectures.
---
## Research Questions
**Q1 — Representation**
Do existing VTON datasets sufficiently represent garments with dense textile patterns and non-Western silhouettes?
**Q2 — Robustness**
How does the performance of SOTA VTON models change when applied to garments with higher pattern complexity and different garment geometries?
**Q3 — Failure modes**
What types of errors occur? (pattern blurring, motif misalignment, garment shape distortion, texture drift)
---
## Why African Garments?
African traditional textiles expose three specific weaknesses in current VTON pipelines:
- **High-frequency patterns** — Ankara and Kente contain dense repeating motifs with strong geometric structure. Spatial warping modules and diffusion decoders frequently blur or hallucinate these during synthesis.
- **Voluminous silhouettes** — Agbada and Boubou have loos …