Color segmentation of multicolor porous printed fabrics by conjugating SOM and EDSC clustering algorithms

In order to achieve accurate color segmentation of printed fabrics, the color segmentation algorithm combining the self-organizing maps neural network and the efficient dense subspace clustering was proposed in this paper. After pre-processing of the fabric image, the primary clustering was implemented by the self-organizing maps algorithm, then the secondary clustering was done by the efficient dense subspace clustering algorithm. The optimal silhouette coefficient is introduced into the clustering process of the efficient dense subspace clustering algorithm to determine the number of clustering centers automatically. Finally, by the post-processing including gray-scale transformation, binarization and open operation, the mis-segmentation of edge color was eliminated, making the algorithm more suitable for industrial application. Experiments were carried out and results show that the algorithm proposed in this paper can recognize the color of small areas accurately and segment the color of complex printed fabric images. The color segmented results of 20 printed fabrics show that the accuracy of the algorithm proposed in this paper reaches 88.3%.