Automatic recognition of the color effect of yarn-dyed fabric by the smallest repeat unit recognition algorithm

In this paper, an effective method based on the smallest repeat unit recognition (SRUR) algorithm is proposed to inspect the color effect of yarn-dyed fabric automatically. This method consists of three main steps: (1) color pattern preliminary recognition; (2) weave repeat unit recognition; (3) color yarn repeat unit recognition. In the first step, the floats in the fabric are located by yarn position segmented with mathematical statistics of sub-images and the colors of all floats classified by the fuzzy C-means algorithm. The color yarn layout is recognized by statistical analysis and the color pattern is roughly generated. In the second step, the weave repeat unit is found based on the preliminary color pattern. The weave repeat unit is extracted from the incompletely recognized weave pattern matrix by the SRUR algorithm. In the last step, according to the weave repeat unit and the preliminary identified color pattern, the color yarn layout is rectified by the improved statistical analysis, and the color yarn repeat unit is finally obtained by the SRUR algorithm. According to the weave and color yarn repeat units, the color effect is produced. The experimental analysis proved that the proposed method can recognize color effects of yarn-dyed fabrics with satisfactory accuracy.