Artificial intelligence can turn a single photo of an item of clothing being worn into accurate sewing patterns to recreate the garment.
Clothing makers use sewing patterns to create the differently shaped pieces of material that make up a garment, using them as templates to cut and sew fabric. Reproducing a pattern from an existing garment can be a time-consuming task, so Xiangyu Xu at Sea AI Lab in Singapore and his colleagues have instead turned to AI.
The team trained an AI model on 1 million images of garments being worn and associated sewing patterns known to be of the same item of clothing.
Advertisement
The researchers then developed a two-stage AI system called Sewformer that could look at images of clothes it hadn鈥檛 seen before, figure out how to disassemble them into their constituent parts and predict where to stitch them to form a garment.
In tests, Sewformer was able to recreate the original sewing patterns with 95.7 per cent accuracy.
鈥淭he first most important application will be in virtual reality or the metaverse,鈥� says Xu, who wants the technology to be able to recreate digital versions of clothes people see and wear in real life. But he also hopes that it can be useful in the real world. 鈥淵ou could very easily design a garment by taking a picture of someone,鈥� he says. 鈥淭hat will help garment manufacturing factories.鈥�
But others have expressed concern about the AI model. 鈥淲hether this tactile knowledge could be reproduced to the same quality and accuracy could be challenged,鈥� says at Northumbria University in Newcastle, UK. She also worries that the research raises ethical questions about digitising highly-skilled roles in the fashion industry such as pattern cutters.
arxiv
