Shade sorting is the process used to partition a set of colored materials to ensure that items in the same group are acceptably close in shade. The goal of this dissertation is to improve upon several of the major techniques related to shade sorting rolls of textile material to be used for garment construction. Topics explored here include determining representative color readings, developing shade sorting algorithms for multi-colored fabrics, and improving existing procedures for shade tapering, a grouping problem similar to sorting.; Both numerical shade sorting and shade tapering depend on reliable color information to correctly group rolls of material. Unfortunately, a standard method for determining representative readings is statistically unreliable. Here, the number of color measurements needed to obtain a representative reading is determined by developing a procedure to generate empirical distributions for numerical color differences.; Several algorithms have been developed for effectively shade sorting single-colored fabrics, but techniques for grouping fabrics of more than one color have received much less attention and are addressed here. In this work, the capabilities of Clemson Color Clustering (CCC), a procedure that works well for single-color shade sorting, are extended for use on material with multiple colors.; Shade tapering places rolls of fabric in a linear sequence by shade so that pieces cut from any two adjacent rolls in the sequence can be used together to construct a satisfactory garment. Compared to current numerical tapering techniques, significant improvements are achieved by developing several algorithms for tapering a set of samples based on heuristic techniques to solve the traveling salesman problem (TSP).; The multi-color shade sorting techniques developed here provide a way to group textile material that has not been previously attempted. Both the tapering algorithms and procedure for determining the number of color readings devised in this work offer a substantial improvement over existing methods. If implemented in a production setting, these findings should provide a textile or apparel manufacturer with a considerable increase in efficiency and product quality.
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