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ditionally, possible applications of the methodology
are proposed.
Particularly, in this paper, a dictionary of primi-
tives for critical features that define the configuration
of a piece of clothing is introduced. The ”words” of
the dictionary include types of junctions, such as ”L”
and ”arrow” junctions, which constitute components
that are used in bibliography (Shapiro and Stockman,
2001) for perceiving 3D objects in 2D images. In-
spired by this approach, we use the same primitives to
define the configuration of a piece of clothing. Nev-
ertheless, in the presented case the primitives do not
represent the joins of the facets of a 3D object but in-
dicate the existence of folds, overlappings, edges and
corners on a garment. Furthermore, machine vision
techniques are used to detect and classify these crit-
ical features into categories. The dictionary can be
used for any configuration under the restriction that
it occurs from holding the garment in the air from its
outline and then laying it onto a table. The main dif-
ference from previous works that aimed at unfolding
clothes is that we try to analyse and comprehend the
configuration of the garment no matter its shape. We
do not use predefined templates, so even pieces of fab-
ric with unusual shapes can be handled.
The outline of this paper is as follows. Section 2
presents the dictionary of primitives in detail, while
in section 3 possible applications are described. In
section 4, the detection and classification of the prim-
itives is implemented. Finally, section 5 includes ex-
perimental results and section 6 some conclusions and
ideas for future work.
2 INTRODUCTION OF
PRIMITIVES FOR THE CLOTH
UNFOLDING
The infinite degrees of freedom of clothes result in
infinite possible configurations. The introduced prim-
itives concern only configurations, where gravity is
used to convert crumbled clothes (Fig 1.b) into a more
straightened, crisp state. In particular, the accepted
configurations can occur after lifting the garment in
the air from a point at its outline when it is fully un-
folded (Fig 1.a), so that all major wrinkles are re-
moved, and then lay it on a working table, as in Fig
1.c. In this paper, configurations on a table are con-
sidered, although the differences when holding the
garment in the air are small. An easy way to de-
tect an outline point is to apply the lowest hanging
point technique as suggested in (Osawa et al., 2007),
(Cusumano-Towner et al., 2011). So, when a garment
grasped from a random point is hanging, its lowest
point is an outline point.
Figure 1: Configurations of the cloth: (a) the outline of the
cloth when it is fully unfolded, (b) a piece of clothing in a
crumbled configuration, (c) the piece of clothing after it is
held in the air from its outline and laid on a working table.
Figure 2: Critical features for the unfolding task and their
characteristic points of intersection: (a) a fold, (b) an over-
lapping.
The primitives of the proposed dictionary are geo-
metric features that describe folds, overlappings, parts
of edges and corners on the surface of the lying piece
of clothing. We define as a fold the result of bending
a cloth over upon itself (Fig 2.a). On the other hand,
an overlapping occurs when a part of a cloth covers
partly another one, if the two participating parts are
not located next to each other in the garment’s un-
folded configuration (Fig 2.b). To indicate the exis-
tence of a fold or overlapping, the detection of the
junction, where the participating layers intersect is
sufficient (Fig 2). Furthermore, the term ”corners”
refers only to the corners that are located at the out-
line ( Fig 1.a)of the unfolded cloth.
The geometrical features, that constitute the in-
troduced primitives, are types of junctions which are
classified according to the number of edges and the
size of the angles they form into ”I”, ”L”, ”T” and
”arrow” junctions (Table 1). So, a fold is detected
by an ”arrow junction”, an overlapping is met when a
”T” junction occurs, a part of an edge is an ”I” junc-
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