Recolouring digital textile printing design with high fidelity

An algorithm of recolouring of polychromatic digital textile printing images is proposed based on the investigation of texture and colour distribution in different channels and image segmentation. A polychromatic image is first separated into monochromatic regions based on watershed transformation in CIELAB colour space. The initial markers are selected by hierarchical histogram analysis to eliminate the inherent drawbacks of over-segmentation in the watershed algorithm. Then the individual monochromatic regions can be mapped with different colours to obtain desirable designs. The artefacts in the boundaries of different regions are reduced by a technique of colour mixing through Gaussian blurring. The experimental simulation results indicated that the performance of the algorithm was quite good in both texture and colour fidelity.