Appearance perception of textiles: a tactile and visual texture study

Abstract

Texture analysis and characterization based on human perception has been continuously sought after by psychology and computer vision researchers. However, the fundamental question of how humans truly perceive texture still remains. In the present study, using a series of textile samples, the most important perceptual attributes people use to interpret and evaluate the texture properties of textiles were accumulated through the verbal description of texture by a group of participants. Smooth, soft, homogeneous, geometric variation, random, repeating, regular, color variation, strong, and complicated were ten of the most frequently used words by participants to describe texture. Since the participants were allowed to freely interact with the textiles, the accumulated texture properties are most likely a combination of visual and tactile information. Each individual texture attribute was rated by another group of participants via rank ordering. Analyzing the correlations between various texture attributes showed strong positive and negative correlations between some of the attributes. Principal component analysis on the rank ordering data indicated that there is a clear separation of perceptual texture attributes in terms of homogeneity and regularity on one hand, and non-homogeneity and randomness on the other hand.