Haptic texture search engine framework

Computer haptics (CH) and computer vision (CV) are two popular research areas among researchers. Despite their increasing in popularity, little has been reported on integrating both techniques in CV into CH. At present, researchers mainly work on either CH or CV topics, separately. Combining these two areas may benefit information retrieval as the existence of haptic information could enhance a particular search. This paper describes how both CV and CH could be applied into our proposed search engine framework for searching fabric textures. The framework developed involves a computer vision algorithm and a haptic rendering algorithm. Based on our experiments that include searching algorithm and haptic rendering, the result shows that computer vision algorithm can be applied into and suitable for generating haptic textures. This leads towards obtaining a haptic texture search engine that enables cloth searching not only visually but also haptically.