A computer vision approach for textile quality control

Textile manufacturers have to monitor the quality of their products in order to maintain the high-quality standards established for the clothing industry. Thus, textile quality control is a key factor for the increase of competitiveness of their companies. Textile faults have traditionally been detected by human visual inspection. However, human inspection is time consuming and does not achieve a high level of accuracy. Therefore, industrial vision units are of strategic interest for the textile industry as they could form the basis of a system achieving a high degree of accuracy on textile inspection. This work describes the software core of a system designed for fabric inspection on the basis of simple imageprocessing operations as well as its efficiency on detection of usual textile defects. The prerequisites of the overall system are then discussed analytically, as well as the limitations and the restrictions imposed due to the nature of the problem. The software algorithm and the evaluation of the first results are also presented in details. Copyright # 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.