AbstractIn order to weave fabric based on a yarn‐dyed fabric sample, the information on the thread arrangement of the fabric must be obtained. In this paper, we will discuss a method for automatically extracting the design elements of yarn‐dyed fabric that correspond to thread placement information with the objective of automating a part of the fabric design process of yarn‐dyed fabrics. In yarn‐dyed fabrics, the pattern on the fabric's surface is formed by the placement of different colored warp and weft threads. Consequently, the features of the warp and weft threads are always continuous in the warp and weft directions. As a result, we show that the bandpass image obtained by filtering the fabric's surface in the spatial frequency domain with a rectangular filter restricted to the warp direction or weft direction extracts information related to the thread placement in that direction. In addition, a simple clustering preprocessing method that detects the brightness is proposed. Then it is verified that the design elements of yarn‐dyed fabric can be extracted based on clustering where the color difference in the bandpass image is the distance. When extracting yarn‐dyed fabric elements, these methods are not concerned with individual regions of the pattern on the fabric's surface or features of each thread but are only concerned with the placement of the colored threads that define the design elements of the yarn‐dyed fabric. They are also provided with an efficiency not available in ea