3-D surface flattening, especially the flattening of 3-D garment, has received increasing interest in the recent years. It is well known that clothing surface partition is a nonlinear, multivariable, and multi modal optimization problem. In this work, an adaptive population tuning scheme (APTS) for DE is proposed to address this issue, which is viewed as traveling salesman problems (TSP). In the APTS, the processing of adding and declining the number of population is designed according to the perturbation method and ranking technique, respectively. Simulation results show that the pro-posed algorithm is better than, or at least comparable to, other classic or adaptive DE algorithms and can effectively search the optimum route which segments the basic body surface.