This Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Phase II project will develop an automated means for embroidery design specification for use in the textile industry. This technology will provide simplified mechanisms for converting scanned artwork into high quality embroidery design data. This data will then be utilized by commercial sewing equipment to produce embroidered artwork that has become quite common on all types of garments and woven goods. Embroidered artwork is often quite expensive to produce and in many cases may substantially exceed the costs of the actual garments being imprinted. These costs arise from a variety of factors including an embroidered design's size and complexity. Well-designed embroidered artwork permits efficient production with high yields (i.e. minimal defects produced). Automating design creation provides additional benefits by eliminating the time consuming manual process that must otherwise be undertaken by a human expert.
The commercial and broader impacts of this technology facilitate lower manufacturing costs while allowing consistent production of high-quality goods. Additionally, this research may have broader applications within other fields such as document processing, image recognition, or other areas where image understanding and interpretation are important.
