5th International Color and Coatings Congress (ICCC 2013) December 18-19, 2013 IsfahanIran

Using SOM neural network for

aesthetic clustering of Iranian carpet designs
T. Soleymanian*, S.H. Amirshahi*, F. Torkamani Azar
*: Department of Textile Engineering, Amirkabir University of Technology, Tehran, Iran

: Faculty of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran, Iran
e-mails: t.smoghadam@aut.ac.ir, hamirsha@aut.ac.ir, f-torkamani@sbu.ac.ir

Abstract
One of the most important aspects of handmade carpet selection is the design. In this paper, the aesthetic
attribute of Iranian carpet designs is studied. In particular, 62 images of different carpet designs are
collected and printed on paper and evaluated by non-professional observers to classify them into four poor,
fair, good, and excellent groups. Besides, the self-organizing map (SOM) neural network is applied to cluster
the exitings designs into four main clusters. Finally, the performance of proposed method regarding to
clustering of groups is compared with those obtained from human aesthetic evaluation. The result showed an
acceptable agreement between the SOM clustering method and the aesthetic evaluation of designs by human
observers.
Keywords: Carpet design- Aesthetic- Self-organizing neural network.

Introduction
The automatic classification of the aesthetic content of a picture is one of the motivating issues in machine
evaluation. However, the aesthetic evaluations are fully subjective and cannot be simpley modeled easily.
Unfortunately, the theory that could explain about the psychological elements of issue does not yet exist [1].
In fact, the aesthetic largely depends on the cultural background of observers [2]. The aesthetic judgments
are based on feeling that deeply depends to the main types of features that are extracted from images, i.e.
color, texture and shape. It is claimed that the shape of objects plays an essential role among the other
aspects of visual information [3]. Different methods have been proposed to cluster the images based on their
shapes. In this work, the SOM neural network is employed to cluster the Iranian carpet designs based on
their aesthetic attributes. The self-organizing feature maps learn to classify input vectors according to how
they are grouped in the input space [4]. The outcome of suggested method is compared with the results of the
visual aesthetic evaluation.

Experimental
In this work, the images of 62 different Iranian carpet designs with different aesthetic contents are collected.
All images were converted to grayscale image to remove the effect of color combinations in aesthetic
evaluation. At the end, the images were resized to 700500 pixels and printed on A5 paper.
Two different visual evaluation tests were performed. Firstly, all printed images were clustered into four
poor, fair, good and excellent groups by 27 observers based on the aesthetic contents of designs. In second
stage, the images were classified to four main groups based on SOM technique and then the created groups
were monitored on a large size disply with high resolution. Subsequently, the observers were asked to judge
the groups according to the general aesthetic appearances of each group. The number 1, 2 3 and 4 were used
to define four poor, fair, good and excellent adjectives of desired groups, respectively.

Results and discussion

Figure 1 shows the generated four groups based on the median of aesthetic visual evaluations of different
Iranian carpet designs. In this respect, several topologies of network were used in SOM method for

5th International Color and Coatings Congress (ICCC 2013) December 18-19, 2013 IsfahanIran

clustering of different patterns of Iranian carpet images and a net with one layer of four nods led to the best
result. The network was trained by the backpropagation algorithm up to 1000 epochs. Results of SOM
clustering technique are listed in Table 1. Table 2 shows the results of visual aesthetic assessment of each
group. To judge the performance of proposed technique the correlation coefficient between the results of
SOM method and aesthetic visual evaluation (Table 2 and Figure 1) was calculated and the value of 0.6 was
obtained.

Figure 1: Four groups obtained from human evaluation, a) to d) show the groups with medians of 1 to 4.
Table 1: Members of the four different aesthetic clusters identified by SOM method
Groups
Group 1
Group 2
Group 3
Group 4

S2
S25
S4
S5
S1
S45

S8
S26
S28
S6
S3
S46

S9
S27
S30
S13
S7
S47

S10
S29
S31
S19
S12
S48

S11
S33
S35
S32
S14
S49

Samples
S15
S36
S37
S38
S16
S50

S17
S51
S59
S39
S20
S52

S18
S56
S62
S41
S21
S53

Table 2: Results of visual evaluation of groups created by SOM technique

Groups
Group 1
Group 2
Group 3
Mark
Fair
Poor
Excellent

S22
S57

S23
S60

S24
S61

S42
S34
S54

S43
S40
S55

S44
S58

Group 4
Good

Conclusions
In this work a quantitative method for the aesthetic evaluations of Iranian carpet designs was introduced. The
SOM neural network was used for the categorization of the features of different carpet images. The
performance of proposed technique was compared with human aesthetic evaluation experiments. The result
showed that the SOM methodology can apply to cluster Iranian carpet designs based on their aesthetic
content with the correlation coefficient of 0.6 with visual assessment results.
Acknowledgements
This work was partially supported by the Iran National Carpet Center.

References
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5th International Color and Coatings Congress (ICCC 2013) December 18-19, 2013 IsfahanIran

[3]
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S. Arivazhagan, L. Ganesan and S. Selvanidhyananthan. IJISE, 2007, 3, 101-103.

H. Demuth and M. Beale. Math Works, 2002.