Image retrieval of wool fabric. Part III: based on aggregated convolutional descriptors and approximate nearest neighbors search

For sample reproduction, texture and color are both significant when the consumer has no specific or individual demands or cannot describe the requirements clearly. In this paper, an effective method based on aggregated convolutional descriptors and approximate nearest neighbors search was proposed to combine the texture and color feature for wool fabric retrieval. Aggregated convolutional descriptors from different layers were combined to characterize the wool fabric image. The approximate nearest neighbors search method Annoy was adopted for similarity measurement to balance the trade-off between the search performance and the elapsed time. A wool fabric image database containing 82,073 images was built to demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed method. Different feature extraction and similarity measurement methods were compared with the proposed method. Experimental results indicate that the proposed method can combine the texture and color feature, being effective and superior for image retrieval of wool fabric. The proposed scheme can provide references for the worker in the factory, saving a great deal of labor and material resources.