## 1 Introduction  
In recent years, requirements for individualized garments have increased rapidly, including clothing styles, colors, and fabrics. However, excellent garment fit is indispensable, which is considered to be a critical factor affecting garment wearing comfort. In today's apparel industry, garment pattern making is a vital procedure of manufacturing well-fitting garments. Garment patterns, also known as paper patterns, refer to paper or cardboard templates based on which the parts of the garment are draw on the fabric before cutting out. Making garment patterns, sometimes called garment structure design, pattern design, pattern drafting, or pattern cutting, is a complicated technique, involving a wide range of knowledge (e.g., aesthetics, mathematics, ergonomics). The key problem of making well-fitting garment patterns is to design garment sizes or dimensions, heavily depending on the expertise and experiences of pattern makers. Generally, the garment sizes are designed and adjusted by pattern makers according to human body dimensions. Individualized garments need more accurate human body dimensions. Therefore, anthropometric measurement is an essential prerequisite for pattern making. Currently, shopping over the internet has become more incorporated into people's lifestyle with the continuously increasing popularity of the internet. Garment suppliers have been challenged in providing individualized garments that fit exactly a certain consumer's body size and body shape, due to the obstacle of procuring human body dimensions directly and precisely through the internet. Ordinarily, human body dimensions could be measured manually or automatically. With the advantages of intuitionistic and convenient tools, manual measurement with tapes has been applied as a conventional method of human body data acquisition for years. However, since the method is greatly dependent on the experience and judgement of the measures, the precision of the data procured is unreliable, which may easily lead to the problem of poor garment fit. Additionally, it is also time-consuming. Compared with the manual anthropometric measurement, the efficiency and accuracy has been greatly improved by 3D human body scanning technology. Over the past decade, 3D human body scanners of various kinds have emerged on the market and been employed in the apparel industry, such as laser scanning, patterned light projection, stereo photogrammetry, millimeter waves, and infrared waves [1; 2]. Contributing to the development of CCD-chips (Charge-coupled Device), the 3D body scanners have the advantages of high resolution (1-8 mm) and speed (0.2-3 s), which makes it possible to collect the whole body's data precisely and economically [1; 2]. However, since the subjects are required to be naked or wear underwater during the process of body scanning, numerous consumers refuse to be measured. Some other disadvantages of the devices, including the bulky design, high price and huge storage capacity for 3D images, have also influenced their further application in the garment industry, particularly in middle and small-scale garment enterprises [2; 3]. Obviously, in the context of sales over the internet, it is unrealistic to utilize the two anthropometric measurement manners aforementioned [4]. In addition, garment enterprises should meet the personalized needs for consumers as soon as possible. Therefore, key dimensions (e.g., body height, bust circumference, waist circumference) which are easy-to-measure are measured physically, while the other detailed dimensions are calculated by inputting the key dimensions into empirical formulas based on linear regression (LR) models. For example, the sleeve length could be calculated by inputting human body height into an LR model. Contributing to inherent simplicity, LR models have been widely applied in the fields of industrial product design including garments, tools, furniture, and workplace [5; 6; 7; 8; 9]. However, these models are not accurate enough [9].