AUTOMATIC WOVEN FABRIC CLASSIFICATION
BASED ON SUPPORT VECTOR MACHINE
P.F. Li, J. Wang*, H.H. Zhang, J.F. Jing
* School of Electronic and Information, Xian Polytechnic University, China, wj86723@163.com,029-82330522
Keywords: Woven fabric, Automatic classficaition, Local
binary pattern, Gray level co-occurrence matrix, Support
vector machine.
Abstract
In the textile industry, the classfication of woven fabric is
usually manual. To improve work efficiency, this paper
purposes a novel approach to extract image features for
woven fabrics recognition automatically. Firstly, the local
binary pattern method and the gray level co-occurrence
matrix are adopted to compute the fabric image features. Then,
the principal component analysis is utilized to reduce the high
dimensional feature data. Lastly, a support vector machine is
used as a classifier to recognize the woven fabric type. The
experiments show that these methods can automatically and
accurately classify the plain weave fabrics, twill weave
fabrics and satin weave fabrics.
1 Introduction
With the development of science and technology, the
recognition of a woven fabric has changed from the manual
work to automatic model. The automatic model not only
speed up the production, but also liberate large quantities of
labour force. This paper intrduced the image processing into
the texture classification to achieve the goal, the automatical
classification of the woven fabric types.
The fabric texture has been studied since the mid-1980s,
which progresses from optical computing to the digital image
processing. The digital image processing methods include
structural method, statistical method, model method and
spectral method. There are some particular ways in the image
processing: the co-occurrence matrix[3], the multi-resolution
wavelet transform[6], the Gauss filtering[4],and the Gabor
transform[1,2]. However, there is a drawback that these
aforementioned methods only achieve the texture orientation
information. To gain the rotation invariant information, it
used the Local binary pattern to describe the relation between
the pixel and the adjacent pixel.
This paper proposed an new method to extract the texture
features by Local binary pattern and gray level co-occurrence.
In addition, the principal component analysis is used to select
feature vectors of these texture images. Lastly, support vector
machine as a classifier, is applied to recognize the woven
fabric types.
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2 Methods
2.1 Local binary pattern
Local binary pattern (LBP) is the binary relation between the
pixel and the pixel around in the gray image. It can extract the
texture information of the local image, and it is invariant
against illumination variation. The original LBP operator
processing[5] is analogous to the template operation of the
filtering process. The operator labels the pixels of an image
by the threshold of the 3h3 neighborhood of each pixel with
the center value and considering the result as a binary number.
Then the histogram of the labels can be used as a texture
descriptor (see Figure 1).
Figure 1: The basic operator.
The LBP Label can be defined as:
P 1
LBP P , R
i 0
s ( g i  g c ) u 2i
(1)
g
Where c represents the center pixel, gi (i 0,1, 2...P  1) is
the i-th neighbor pixel, P is the total number of neighbor pixel.
R is the circle radius, which determines how far the neighbor
pixels are located away from the center pixel, and the S is a
sign function, which expresses as:
1 x t 0
s(x) (2)
0 x  0
To improve the presentation skill, ojala et al.[9] extended the
the basic LBP. If we suppose the value of R and P, taking the
center pixel as the centre of a circle, it can equally sample P
points in the circle with the radius R. The neighbor pixel's
value calculates by the bilinear interpolation. Meanwhile, the
extended LBP has many advantages, such as local resolution,
rotational invariance and illumination invariance.
 2
Generally speaking, when the same texture element rotates to N 1 N 1

certain angle, it could be taken for the different binary pattern. Q1

i 0 j 0
[C (i, j )]
In order to solve this problem, the uniform LBP[8] has been (3)
introduced. If the corresponding binary label sequence has no Contrast:
2
more than two transitions between "0" and "1" among all N 1 N 1
pairs of the adjacent binary labels, it is uniform LBP, which Q2 k 2
.C ( i , j ) k i j
has rotational invariance (see Figure. 2).Otherwise, it is non- i 0 j 0
(4)
uniform LBP. For a texture image, it has the P+1 uniform Entropy:
LBP, and all the non-uniform LBP has been marked the same N 1 N 1
label. The circle neighborhood's LBPP , R can be written as: Q3  C (i, j ).log 2 C (i, j )
i 0 j 0
(5)
correlation:
N 1 N 1

i 0 j 0
i . j .C ( i , j )  P x . P y

Q 4 2 2
V x .V y
(6)
Figure 2: The rotational invariance of uniform LBP.
with
N 1 N 1
2.2. Gray level co-occurrence matrix
Px i C (i, j )
i 0 j 0
The gray level co-occurrence matrix of an image can reflect (7)
the comprehensive informations of image gray level [4], N 1 N 1
which are about directions,adjacent interval and rangeability.
It has been proved a good method of texture analysis in
Py j C (i , j )
j 0 i 0
(8)
theory and experiment. GLCM was brought out in 1973 by 2 N 1
N 1
Haralick. It describes the grey value i and j ,the 2 pixels'
frequency correlation matrix P(i,j,d, ) of the N-graylevel
V x2 (i  P ) C (i, j )
i 0
x
j 0
image in direction and distance d. P(i,j,d,), the element (9)
N 1 2 N 1
of graylevel co-occurrence matrix in i-row and j-
column,expresses all appeared probability of the grey value i V y2 ( j  P ) C(i, j)
j 0
y
i 0
and j in direction and distance d. is the angle of the x (10)
axis and the two pixels' line, and the angle of is
0,45,90,135. Distance d is related to the image, generally 2.3 Principal Component analysis
according to the test to determine (see figure 3). When
Principal Component Analysis (PCA) is a multivariable
calculating of two pixel grayscale appeared probability,
analysis method, which descends dimension by the linear
GLCM should be normalized.
combination of the features. It virtually makes the high
dimensional data project into the low dimension data on
condition that low dimension data can represent original data
well. Therefore, principal component analysis obtains the
projection matrix actually, then the high dimension data
multiply this projection matrix to get the low dimension data,
whose dimension we can specify.
The most import thing in the Principal Component Analysis is
solving the transformation matrix T . Then , Obtaining the
low dimension data by Y XT .

2.4 Support Vector Machine

Figure 3: The diagram of gray level co-occurrence matrix.
Support Vector Machine (SVM) is a machine learning
algorithm based on statistical theory. Support Vector Machine
Ulaby and others have found that: although there are 14
is an effective binary-class classification method based on
texture features in GLCM, only 4 features are not relevant,
Structural Risk Minimization. That is to say, SVM can
which are convenient for computation and can give a higher
balance the minimization between training error (empirical
accuracy of classification. Generally people use these 4
risk) and testing error (expected risk), which depends on the
common features to extract image texture features: energy,
selection of classification model and model parameters.
contrast, correlation and entropy.
Energy:

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Figure 4: The optimal hyperplane.

SVM algorithm needs to get optimal hyperplane to separate

the two-class data points in the n-D space. The optimal
hyperplane not only correctly divides the two-class data
points, but also achieves the maximal classified interval. In
the linearly separable situation, there are so many planes
divided the two samples. But in the Figure 4, the optimal
hyperplane correctly divide the two-class data points, and
obtain the maximal margin M. The margin between the two
planes H1 and H2 is 2 / w , and the maximal margin boils
down to the optimization problem about variable w and b.
SVM is a two-class classifiers, and it only can classify the
two-class samples. So we should extend SVM to settle
multiple classes.

Figure 6: The fabric image and frequency histogram.
Taking the plain weave for example, there is no obvious
difference between the original plain weave and the image
with reduced grayscale from 256 to 16 (see Figure 7). The
results of the features of three fabrics GLCM shown as table 1.
When the value of is 0 , 90 , and the distance (d) is
1,calculating four features (energy, contrast, correlation,
entropy) .

3 Experimental results
In this study, the experimental fabrics include plain, twill, and
satin weaves. Under the same external condition, it acquired
45 groups woven fabric images, with the size 200x200 pixels 
and 600 dpi. Figure 5 shows the three basic woven fabrics: (a)The original plain weave (b)The reduced grayscale image
plain, twill and satin weave. To achieve the better images, we Figure 7: The mean and standard deviation of three filtered
use median filter and histogram equalization as fabric image fabric images.
preprocessing.
Energy Contrast Entropy correlation
Plain(0) 0.009965 6.688065 7.026869 -50.75467
Plain(90) 0.010847 6.365402 6.984174 -50.65222
Twill(0) 0.014492 3.502186 6.580797 -50.54763
Twill(90) 0.011611 7.660176 7.004591 -50.65662
Satin(0) 0.016130 3.721080 6.479973 -50.29330
Satin(90) 0.010867 12.779196 7.111671 -50.23056
Figure5: Three basic woven fabric images. Table 1: The features of three fabrics GLCM.

3.1. Experiment I 3.2. Experiment II

After preprocessing the woven fabric images, it can calculate
the frequency histogram of the uniform local binary patterns.
When the radius R = 1, 2, 3 with neighborhood P = 8, 16, 24,
the dimension of the local binary pattern histogram separately
is 10, 18, 26. These three features using together reveals the
best representation of the LBP. Figure 6 shows that the
preprocessing plain weave image and its frequency
histograms.
Through the feature extraction, each fabric image has 62
characteristic parameters. In order to keep the useful
information and reduce the redundant information, this paper
introduces Principal Component Analysis. PCA is found to
achieve good effect and can specify characteristics of the
fabric images by lesser dimension. Figure 8 is the variance
explained by Principal Components, and the front PCA
contribution rate is higher than the latter. It selects the number
of reducing the dimension is 3, because the accumulative

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contributing rate of the third principal component more than
95%.

Figure 8: Variance explained by Principal Components
At the end of the process, the 45 woven fabrics should be
classified by support vector machine [15]. First of all, taking
the training samples of the 30 woven fabrics as the input data
of SVM to produce the network by training and learning.
Secondly, the testing samples of the 15 woven fabrics as the
input data of SVM to test by the formed network. The testing
result displays that the classification accuracy using this
method is 87.77%. Figure 9 is the training samples, and
Figure 10 is the testing samples. After testing the 15 woven
fabrics, two twill weaves have been mistaken as plain weaves.
There are two reasons: the similar structure between twill and
plain; the variety of the twill weave.
Figure 9: The training samples.
Figure 10: The testing samples
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4 Conclusions
It is obvious that a good feature extraction can gain a good
pattern recognition result. In the present study of the fabric
structure classification, the LBP method and the gray level
co-occurrence matrix method could extract the texture feature
of plain, twill and satin weave efficiently, and the support
vector machine can classify the fabric structure texture
accurately. Compared with using LBP method and the gray
level co-occurrence matrix method only, the experimen shows
that the best classification accuracy is using these methods
together. In order to enlarge the range of its application, it can
add the samples of knitted fabric and non-woven fabric.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank for the support of Scientific
Research Program Funded by Shaanxi Provincial Education
Department (Program No. 11JK0910) Research and
Development Project of science and technology(Project NO.
2011K07- 25), Shaanxi, PRC.
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