A novel approach to using neural networks to predict the colour of fibre blends

This work is concerned with the colour prediction of viscose fibre blends, comparing two conventional prediction models (the Stearns–Noechel model and the Friele model) and two neural network models. A total of 333 blended samples were prepared from eight primary colours, including two-, three-, and four-colour mixtures. The performance of the prediction models was evaluated using 60 of the 333 blended samples. The other 273 samples were used to train the neural networks. It was found that the performance of both neural networks exceeded the performance of both conventional prediction models. When the neural networks were trained using the 273 training samples, the average CIELAB colour differences (between measured and predicted colour of blends) for the 60 samples in the test set were close to 1.0 for the neural network models. When the number of training samples was reduced to only 100, the performance of the neural networks degraded, but they still gave lower colour differences between measured and predicted colour than the conventional models. The first neural network was a conventional network similar to that which has been used by several other researchers; the second neural network was a novel application of a standard neural network where, rather than using a single network, a set of small neural networks was used, each of which predicted reflectance at a single wavelength. The single-wavelength neural network was shown to be more robust than the conventional neural network when the number of training examples was small.