Vector Quantization of Textile Patterns
for Jacquard Looms
Lale Akarun and Yagar Fatih Sartgoz
Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering
Bo&ziCi University,
80815 Bebek btanbul, lhrkey
Abstract - In jacquard looms, the design to be weaved
is determined by a perforated card. The machine per-
forating these cards is controlled, in turn, by the color
textile design on paper, which is digitized by a color
scanner. The output produced by the color scanner
contains 24bits of color and is at a higher spatial res-
olution than desired. We use vector quantization for
color quantization and reduction of spatial resolution.
INTRODUCTION
The working principle of the jacquard loom is similar
to that of the pianola: it is programmed by a perfo-
rated card on which the perforations control the hed-
dles independently of each other, determining in effect,
the pattern that is to be weaved. The jacquard loom
was invented in the nineteenth century, and although
advanced models have emerged over the years, the per-
forated card principle remairls the same. However, the
method of transferring a pattern into a perforated card
has changed substantially. Initially, that used t o be
achieved through a human puncher, and used to rep-
resent the most tedious and time consuming part of
the weaving process [l].
The current method of transferring the pattern to
the perforated cardhvolves the use of a color scan-
ner which transfers the pattern painted on paper to a
de&e that uses this data to control the pins that per-
forate the jacquard cards [2] Since a single mistake on
the jacquard card will lead to an error in the weave and
will render useless hundreds of meters of material, mis-
takes are intolerable. For this reason, the scanned pat-
tern is inspected visually and mistakes are corrected
interactively. This stage is currently the most t i m e
consuming part of the process and the inspection is
still prone t o human error. We try to remedy or al-
leviate this problem using vector quantization of the
scanned image.
~
OThis study is supported by Boefazid Univusity Research
h d
0-7803-1772-6/94/$3.00 @ 1994 IEEE
109
The input to the scanner is a pattern painted by
the textile designer on special paper using special ink
so as to minimize irregularities due to reflections and
brush strokes. The output of the color scanner is a
discrete array of integers which represent the color
at that position. The color resolution of the scanner
is 24 bits, and consequently, colors from a range of
224 = 16 777 216 different colors are created, whereas
only about a dozen different colored areas are meant to
be produced. The color resolution, therefore, must be
reduced. The spatial resolution of the scanner is also
higher than desired: The desired spatial resolution is
dictated by the number of warp and weft threads in
a centimeter square in the final fabric. Although the
spatial resolution of the scannner is adjustible, that
value is in general, a multiple of ]IO. Therefore, it
is necessary to scan at a higher resolution and then
reduce this resolution. As a result, both data reduc-
tion and quantization of amplitude must be performed.
Vector quantization (VQ) solves these problems simul-
taneously: A block of pixels is represented by a repro-
duction symbol from a limited alphabet. In our case,
each symbol represents a color from an alphabet of
about twenty colors. After vector quantization into
codewords, we keep only the indices of the codewords,
and discard the actual codewords, as we do not have
to reconstruct the image itself.
In the next section, we summarize the use of vector
quantization for color quantization. We then describe
the use of vector quantization for image compression.
We then go on to outline our approach, use of vector
quantization for color and spatial resolution reduction.
VQ FOR COLOR QUANTIZATION
The problem of color quantization usually arises due
to the limited capabilities of display monitors. When a
color image is digitized, each of the R,G, and B compo-
nents is represented by 8 bits, resulting in 224 distinct
colors. On the other hand, due to memory restrictions,
many display monitors can display only 256 distinct of diagonal edges by jagged ones. Therefore, for better
colors simultaneously. This 256 color palette may be subjective quality, it is preferred t o design a separate
selected from the set of available colors. Therefore, it codebook partition representing edges in addition to a
is needed t o quantize a large range of colors with a codebook partition for shade cells [SI.
limited palette. This problem has been tackled in [4]
using the LBG algorithm.
The LBG algorithm [5]is an iterative method used Color VQ
in vector quantization. Given the number of clusters to
In vector quantization of color images, it is common t o
be formed, it iteratively refines the cluster centers and
use the luminance - chrominance representation since
boundaries. The iteration is stopped when the mean
the chrominance components can be subsampled by a
square error falls below a threshold or remains con- factor of two in two spatial directions without any vi-
stant between iterations. The algorithm is guaranteed sual degradation in picture quality. Two different ap-
to converge to a minimum. However, this minimum
proaches for color VQ are presented in [7]:The first ap-
may be a local minimum of the mean square error. proach is individual component VQ, where each com-
The LBG algorithm is applied to the color quantiza-
ponent is vector quantized as an individual gray-scale
tion problem in [4]as follows: Let X n = [rn,gnlbnIT image. The second approach is combined component
denote the color value of a pixel a t location n and let VQ, where the input vector is defined as a combina-
{qn : 1 5 n 5 M } denote the color palette. The
tion of spatial and spectral components. In the second
algorithm proceeds as follows:
approach, a vector is defined as a block of 4 x 4 lumi-
1. Choose an initial palette nance components and two 2 x 2 chrominance com-
ponents. The former method is computationally less
2. Form M pixel clusters costly while the latter achieves higher compression ra-
tio.
Cm = {xn I I X n - q m l l Il l x n - q k l I l 1 Ik IMI. One disadvantage of the outlined techniques is that
when they are applied to images that have been quan-
3. Recompute the color palette using qm = tized using a limited palette, the reconstructed images
1/ICml CsEc, ~ 8 . contain colors not contained in the original palette.
Therefore, it is necessary t o requantize the images
4. Repeat 2 and 3 until no more changes occur or prior to display. The same problem is encountered
the decrease in mean square error is less than a in the coding of color quantized imges and a different
predetermined amount. approach is proposed in the coding of such images in
It is noted that the selection of the initial palette is [SI: The technique takes advantage of the fact that
crucial in the success of the algorithm. the color vectors can take on only 256 different values
and regards each color as a symbol. The coding prob-
lem is then reduced to coding the image in the space
VQ FOR IMAGE COMPRESSION of symbols instead of the three-dimensional space of
colors. The real difficulty in this approach lies in the
When vector quantization is used for image compres order in which the colors in the palette are assigned
sion, the image is partitioned into blocks of N = n x n symbols. In order to obtain successful results, this
pixels, which form a N-dimensional vector. This vec- ordering should be done so that consecutive symbols
tor is encoded by searching a codebook of represen- are assigned to visually similar colors and so that dis-
tative quantization vectors. Let f = [fi,. . . , f ~ de-] tant ~ symbols represent visually different colors. More
note a vector that is formed from a block of*sizeN specifically, given N colors XI,.. . , X N ,and a distance
of the image. In VQ, f is mapped into another N- measure d ( - ) , it is desired to find an ordering O ( t ) of
dimensional vector r = [ T I , . . . ,r ~ ] The ~ . vector r is these colors such that for all i , j E [l,N] and for all
chosen from L possible quantization symbols in a way m , n E [i,jI,
that minimizes an Euclidean distance measure. The
quantization symbols are chosen so as to be optimal
for a given distribution. The techniques for choosing
the quantization symbols and the different search al- Noting that such a global ordering is hard to obtain,
gorithms for the encoding stage have been reviewed the authors of [SIhave opted for a local ordering of the
and detailed in [3]. colors in a smaller block, where the ordering of the lu-
Vector quantization of images with larger block sizes minance represents an adequate ordering of the colors
(larger than 2 x 2) usually results in the replacement since the color variation within the block is small.

110
 VQ FOR SPATIAL AND COLOR RESOLUTION
REDUCTION
In our application, we want t o reduce the spatial and
color resolution simultaneously. Vector quantization
techniques have been applied separately to sratial res-
olution reduction (compression) and to color quantiza-
tion. Our approach combines these together and com-
putes a quantized color value for each block of pixels.
We apply the approach used for coding of color
quantized images in [8] to vector quantization: Rather
than vector quantizing the color components sepa-
rately or creating a larger block by combining different
color components from a block of the image, we view
the colors as symbols. The first step then, is finding an
ordering O(k) such that Equation 1 is satisfied. After
such an ordering is performed, the problem is formu-
lated as follows: Let g = [gl , . . . ,g ~ denote ] ~a vector
that is formed from a block of size N of a pseudo-image
which is formed of symbols resulting from the order-
ing O ( k ) of the colors ck in the limited palette of the
image. This pseudo-image g is mapped into another
N-dimensional vector r = [ T I , . . . , T N ] ~ For
. codebook
design and code assignment, we use the LBG algorithm
~51.
RESULTS
For the tests, a 256 x 256 region of a textile image
quantized to 256 colors has been used. Figure 2a shows
the gray-scale printout of that image. The image con-
sists of 9 colors: dark blue, teal, lilac, green, yellow,
pink, white, orange, and purple. The colors in the 256-
color palette are represented by an index ranging from
0 to 255. This index, in general, follows an ordering of
colors; for example, different shades of the same color
have sequential indices. However, the ordering is ran-
dom for different colors, and Equation 1 is not satisfied
in general. Figure 1 shows the histogram of the indices
of the image in Figure 2a. One would expect to find
9 different impulses in the histogram corresonding to
9 differently colored regions. However, due to irregu-
larities in brush strokes and due to scanner noise, the
colors are spread out, and false colors corresponding
to noise are created. As a result, one cannot iifid 9
peaks in the histogram. It is clear that one needs a re-
ordering of the indices in order to differentiate some of
the colors properly. However, finding such an ordering
is not simple. The luminance components of many of
the colors were observed to be very close, so finding an
ordering based on the luminance, as in [8], was found
to be inappropriate. Therefore, the search for such an
ordering was delayed for the time being and the tests
111
I
l2O0 1
Figure 1: Histogram of the color indices of the image
in Figure 2a
were conducted on the indices representing the colors
in the palette.
The image in Figure 2a was vector quantized us-
ing a block size of 3 x 3. The codebook size was 32,
large enough to represent all colors and edges between
them. It is observed that Figure 2a contains a con-
siderable amount of noise. Preprocessing the image
prior to vector quantization by median filtering was
an option. However, when that was done, small image
details were lost. Therefore, it was preferred to vector
quantize the image as is, and manipulate the vector
quantized image to eliminate the noise.
Figure 2b shows the result of vector quantization us-
ing the LBG algorithm. The corresponding codebook
is shown in Figure 3a, where the first and the second
rows show codewords 1-16 and 16-32, respectively. In-
spection of the most frequently occuring codewords
confirms that they correspond to shade cells. The rest
of the codewords represent either edges or noise. It
is desired to eliminate the noise and merge the noise
cells with the closest shade cells. For this purpose,
the codebook was filtered to remove noise. The steps
involved can be summarized as follows:
Step 1:
Let yi represent the ith codeword, with el-
ements yf,.. . ,yt. Let y f l ) ,. . . ,ytgi rep-
resent the order statistics of the t e se-
quence yj. For each codeword, find the stan-
dard deviations of the sequences yi , . . . , y i ,
~ f l ) , 7 Y~S),and ~:2),... ,~‘g)r S D , S D m i n ,
- e .
and SO,,,, respectively. Ciassify codebook
elements as ‘N’, ‘S’, or ‘E’:
‘S’ if SD 5 7.5
‘N’ if SD > 7.5 and SD,i, or SD,,, 5
12.5

F i w e 2: top to bottom, left to right: (a) Original im-
age (b) vector quantized image (c) After step 1 (d) Af-
ter step 2
‘E’ otherwise.
0 For each ‘S’ and ‘N’ cell, replace yi, . . . , yf,
3
by E;=,Ytj,.
Step 2: Assign new values to codebook elements so
as to correspond to peaks in image histogram
Figure 3b shows the result of applying this algo-
rithm to the codebook of Figure 3a. Figure 2c and
Figure 2d show the image after steps 1 and 2. The
gray-scale strecthing applied in step 2 serves to accen-
tuate individual colors and also makes classification
errors more visible. It is noted that some regions are
incorrectly classified. When colors in the original im-
age are checked, it is seen that those regions corre-
spond to colors whose indices are close to each other.
This observation confirms the necessity of a reordering
of the colors prior to vector quantization.
CONCLUSION
In this paper, we describe how vector quantization may
be used to solve the problems encountered in the p r e
gramming of jacquard looms. We use vector quanti-
zation for spatial and color resolution reduction: The
color of a block of pixels is represented by a codeword
in the alphabet of colors. We formulate the problem
in a novel way in that we view the the limited number
c
I
Figure 3: (a) top: codebook.for Figure 2b, (b) bottom:
codebook after steps 1 and 2
of colors as different symbols. In the tests, we have by-
passed the ordering stage, and have shown that we ob-
tain reasonable results. The shortcomings of the color
classification, when evaluated in combination with the
histogram of the test images, indicate that the success
of the algorithm would be increased substantially by
finding an appropriate ordering. We are continuing
our research on finding such an ordering.
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