Visuo-haptic Cross-modal Recognition for Fabrics

Abstract

Online shopping has become prevalent because it is convenient and saves time. However, there are still many drawbacks to purchasing clothing online. One such problem is the discrepancy between information obtained from a photograph (visual information) versus the actual fabric hand (haptic information). One reason for this is that the haptic information may not sufficiently convey to consumers. The objective of this study was to examine the influence of fabric texture on the information transfer from visual to haptic and vice versa. A generalized linear mixed model (GLMM) was used to find the difficulties of memorizing or retrieving the fabric. The random effects of the model are the individual differences between participants or samples. The GLMM analysis showed that there was an individual difference among fabrics in subject's performance for haptic and visuo-haptic recognition, but not for visual recognition. The subsequent analysis suggested that the cross-modal recognition failure mainly occurred in the estimation of fabric thickness. Surface texture was a very important factor for estimating the connection between visual and haptic information. When the surface texture was evaluated visually first and then haptically second, participants might evaluate the surface as rougher than the actual texture.