GarmentImage: Raster Encoding of Garment Sewing Patterns with Diverse Topologies

Garment sewing patterns are the design language behind clothing, yet their current vector-based digital representations weren't built with machine learning in mind. Vector-based representation encodes a sewing pattern as a discrete set of panels, each defined as a sequence of lines and curves, stitching information between panels and the placement of each panel around a body. However, this representation causes two major challenges for neural networks: discontinuity in latent space between patterns with different topologies and limited generalization to garments with unseen topologies in the training data. In this work, we introduce GarmentImage, a unified raster-based sewing pattern representation. GarmentImage encodes a garment sewing pattern's geometry, topology and placement into multi-channel regular grids. Machine learning models trained on GarmentImage achieve seamless transitions between patterns with different topologies and show better generalization capabilities compared to models trained on vector-based representation. We demonstrate the effectiveness of GarmentImage across three applications: pattern exploration in latent space, text-based pattern editing, and image-to-pattern prediction. The results show that GarmentImage achieves superior performance on these applications using only simple convolutional networks.