A transparent PNG image has 4 channels - 3 for RGB and one for Alpha transparency. How Chrome renders transparent PNG images. Given checkered pattern instead of ‘white’ or ‘black’, meant that the background was transparent. The image was not only a PNG, but a PNG with a transparent background! Below we can see how the image was rendered in Photoshop. Our second observation made it even more clear as to why might the background behave differently on different platforms. png, we were able to open the image in Photoshop. jpg: PNG image data, 949 x 800, 8-bit/color RGBA, non-interlacedĬhanging the extension from. On checking the image type it became clear that it was a PNG image masked by a'.jpg' extension. This meant the image was not a JPEG image to begin with. It complained of an invalid JPEG marker type. To our surprise, Photoshop did not even open the image. Perplexed why this was the case, we tried opening the image on Adobe Photoshop. Our system found the background to be 'black' but Chrome showed it to be 'white'. Indeed as the seller claimed, the image had a background as white as it gets! It seemed like some of those magical whatsapp image forwards, where the image changes on opening.

However, the seller was confident of providing white background images and according to the seller, we were unnecessarily, and to sellers indignation, rejecting it! Background being white is one standardisation criteria on Snapdeal, for most categories. In one particular case, the images from one seller, were being rejected because its background was not white. If the image fails anyone of the checks, it is rejected by our system with the reason as the feedback. The checks range from, image size, resolution, compression, sharpness, background color, and so on. Every image goes through an array of checks before it is labeled as poor quality. One of them is, rejecting an image because of poor quality. Over time, some of our algorithms have matured enough that we are pretty confident they work well. Our automated pipeline rejects images that do not conform to prescribed standards.

What do you do when you have sellers complaining that professionally shot images are being rejected as poor quality? Especially when you have an automated image processing pipeline to ingest product images uploaded by sellers.

Opencv interlacing image