Abstract: Because of the diversity of printing patterns of fabrics,traditional image segmentation arithmetic usually can not detect the drape contours of fabrics correctly.Therefore,according to features of the contours in fabric drape images,an active contour model(Snakes model)based on the gradient vector flow(GVF) field is proposed to recognize the edges of fabrics.A Snake edge detection model is implemented by greedy arithmetic,and then the drape contours of 5 typical printing fabrics detected by this model are compared with the contours extracted by edge gradient scanning.The result of the experiment shows that this edge detection model is able to precisely detect various drape contours of special printing fabrics,which can not be detected precisely,or even are undetectable,by traditional image segmentation arithmetic.