Structural Textile Pattern Recognition and Processing Based on Hypergraphs

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel hypergraph-based method for recognizing and clustering complex textile weaving patterns to improve digital textile archives' search capabilities, demonstrating efficiency and effectiveness.

Contribution

It introduces the first practical hypergraph-based approach for modeling and retrieving complex textile weaving patterns in digital archives.

Findings

Efficient linear complexity implementation.

Effective clustering of large textile datasets.

Improved search functionality for textile archives.

Abstract

The humanities, like many other areas of society, are currently undergoing major changes in the wake of digital transformation. However, in order to make collection of digitised material in this area easily accessible, we often still lack adequate search functionality. For instance, digital archives for textiles offer keyword search, which is fairly well understood, and arrange their content following a certain taxonomy, but search functionality at the level of thread structure is still missing. To facilitate the clustering and search, we introduce an approach for recognising similar weaving patterns based on their structures for textile archives. We first represent textile structures using hypergraphs and extract multisets of k-neighbourhoods describing weaving patterns from these graphs. Then, the resulting multisets are clustered using various distance measures and various clustering algorithms (K-Means for simplicity and hierarchical agglomerative algorithms for precision). We evaluate the different variants of our approach experimentally, showing that this can be implemented efficiently (meaning it has linear complexity), and demonstrate its quality to query and cluster datasets containing large textile samples. As, to the est of our knowledge, this is the first practical approach for explicitly modelling complex and irregular weaving patterns usable for retrieval, we aim at establishing a solid baseline.