Abstract:

Due to the variety of yarn colours and arrangement, it is a challenging problem to retrieve a yarn-dyed fabric image. In this paper, yarn-dyed fabric samples are captured by the DigiEye system first, and then pattern images of the fabric images captured are simulated by pattern design software based on extracted structure parameters of the yarn-dyed fabric. For the simulated pattern image, an effective algorithm is proposed to retrieve these kinds of images by combining the colour moments method and perceptual hash algorithm. Then the pattern images retrieved are mapped back to the yarn-dyed fabric image so as to realise the yarn-dyed fabric image retrieval. In the algorithm proposed, the colour moments method is adopted to extract the colour features, and the perceptual hash algorithm is utilised to calculate the spatial features of the simulated pattern images. Then the two kinds of image features are used to compute the similarity between the input original image and each target image based on the Euclidean distance and Hamming distance. Relevant images can be retrieved in dependence on the similarity value, which is determined by calculating the optimum weighted value of the colour features’ similarity and spatial features’ similarity. In order to measure the retrieval efficiency of the method proposed, the accuracy rate and retrieval rate of image retrieval were computed in experiments using a PATTERN image database with 300 images. The experimental results show that the average accuracy rate of the method proposed is 85.30% and the retrieval rate - 53.51% when the weighted value of the colour feature similarity is fixed at 0.45 and the spatial feature similarity is 0.55. It is shown that the method presented is effective to retrieve pattern images of yarn-dyed fabric.