Structural description of textile and tile pattern designs using image processing

Cataloguing pattern and tiling designs using their geometrical features is an old research topic, whose main goal is the synthesis of new designs. However, little effort have been made to approach the inverse problem, this is the analysis of a design using image processing techniques. A set of structural descriptors for automatically classifying designs of textile and tile fabric is proposed. Graphic descriptors as parallelogram fundamental, design cluster, design symmetry axes etc., are properly re-defined in a new framework that, using the theory of symmetry groups, tries to describe the structure of a pattern design. We describe the sequence of operations introduced for the analysis and extraction of these structural descriptors and the methodology used in each stage, devoting special attention to the techniques used in the image segmentation, object extraction, and clustering stages. Experimental results with textile patrimony images and tile museum images are also included.