ViCo: Human visual perception-based contour extraction of Chinese Tang dynasty textile patterns

The study of ancient textile patterns not only enriches historical material but also inspires modern costume art design. Recent developments in computer vision technology provide novel analytical methods for the study of ancient textile patterns. As contours are one of the most significant features in computer vision tasks, contour extraction serves as a prerequisite to accomplishing intelligent understanding and automatic design of textile patterns. In this paper, a perception-consistent contour extraction method (ViCo) that simulates the human visual system from the retina, the lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN), to the V1 area in the cortex is proposed, along with an ancient textile pattern dataset represented by TuanKe in the Chinese Tang dynasty. Experiments were conducted both qualitatively and quantitatively to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method on the TuanKe dataset. Analysis of the results implies the effectiveness of ViCo because the retinal and LGN filter enhances edge information and restrains tiny pixel changes, and the cortex simulation is direction selective. This study is among the initial efforts to employ computer vision technology for ancient textile pattern studies. The study presents a TuanKe dataset and a novel bio-inspired contour extraction method, which has significant historical research importance, fabric art design inspiration, and computer application value.