A new method for automatic separation of fabric color

A novel method combining the characteristics of structure and region information is proposed for automatic segmentation of the color region for different kinds of fabrics. For improving image quality for computer analysis, the structure-texture decomposition processing has been used to extract the main structure from the fabric image, where the fine structure details of fabric yarn patterns have been removed. By using the CIE-Lab color system, the color structure image is then segmented by a fuzzy region-based segmentation model that can be solved efficiently through a fast numerical scheme. The experimental results show that the main disadvantage and difficulty of using color clustering-based methods and commonly used image segmentation methods for fabric color separation is overcome by the proposed method. The proposed method has high accuracy and the computation time is very reasonable. It can be applied to extract fabric color regions for different fabric structures, such as woven, knitted and embroidery structures.