A new approach to clothing classification using mid-level layers

Bryan Willimon, Ian D. Walker, Stan Birchfield

Abstract: We present a novel approach for classifying items from a pile of laundry. The classification procedure exploits color, texture, shape, and edge information from 2D and 3D local and global information for each article of clothing using a Kinect sensor. The key contribution of this paper is a novel method of classifying clothing which we term L-M-H, more specifically L-C-S-H using characteristics and selection masks. Essentially, the method decomposes the problem into high (H), low (L) and multiple mid-level (characteristics(C), selection masks(S)) layers and produces “local” solutions to solve the global classification problem. Experiments demonstrate the ability of the system to efficiently classify and label into one of three categories (shirts, socks, or dresses). These results show that, on average, the classification rates, using this new approach with mid-level layers, achieve a true positive rate of 90%.