Generating Jacquard Fabric Pattern With Visual Impressions

Abstract

With jacquard fabric, designers can create complex patterns by freely defining the over–under relationships between warp yarns and weft yarns at each grid point or intersections in the fabric. Binary images are one way of representing the over–under relationships of warp and weft yarns at the grid points in a fabric pattern; an image requires an optimal number of warp–weft intersections—not too many, not too few—to produce a weave with both aesthetic and functional merits. This study proposes a method for generating jacquard fabric patterns that reproduce the visual impressions of given input images on jacquard fabric. Our method makes it possible to assign specific fabric dither masks to individual regions. These fabric dither masks can preserve the overall tone of the input image in the dithered image while appropriately controlling the number of warp–weft intersections in the pattern. As the fabric dither masks give users a considerable degree of freedom in defining texture frequencies and directional properties, the proposed method captures the visual impression of a given input image by enabling users to apply fabric dither masks to match textural features—either automatically or interactively. The former approach involves assigning the mask with the closest textural resemblance to each target region, ultimately producing a fabric pattern with a tone and texture that matches the input image. The interactive approach, meanwhile, provides the designer with an interactive interface for assigning masks. This allows designers to experiment with different expressions and track their progress visually, emphasizing or subduing specific areas at their own discretion.