Color Reduction of Hand-painted Carpet Patterns Before Discretization

Carpet patterns are in two categories: machine-painted and hand-painted. Hand-painted patterns are divided into two groups: before and after discretization. The purpose of this study is color reduction of hand-painted patterns before discretization. There are some articles about color reduction of hand-painted carpet patterns after discretization, but so far, there is not an article on patterns before discretization. The proposed algorithm consists of the following steps: image segmentation, finding the color of each region, color reduction around the edges and final color reduction with C-means. For 80 segments of different 20 patterns, the algorithm has an approximate of 96% accuracy. In other words, the colors of 96% of image pixels are found correctly. The high accuracy of this method is due to its fitness to the application. The proposed method is not fully automatic and requires the total number of colors as its input.