Next-Gen Textile Industry: From Digital Acquisition to Displacement Mapping

Replicating the tactile and visual qualities of real-world surfaces and objects is a priority for 3D visualization and processing in many application fields. The next-gen textile industry is at the forefront of this trend, increasingly embracing the use and experimentation of digital twins to represent real-world objects. This research explores the creation of virtual twins of textile fabric samples from normal map images for their subsequent integration into a virtual reality (VR)/augmented reality (AR) environment for tactile and visual exploration. In particular, we first study various techniques for normal integration, a method that generates a 3D mesh from observed information about surface normal field. Next, we present a procedure to generate height maps from quadrilateral surfaces with rectangle-shaped boundary. Height map, storing displacement information in the normal direction w.r.t. a surface, represent an ideal candidate to transfer geometric details from a sample onto a 3D object via displacement mapping. Lastly, an adaptive displacement mapping method is proposed to automatically add textured height maps onto smooth surfaces to enrich their geometric details.