Image Processing Technologies in Textile Applications

Image processing technology started making in-road in many industrial fields including textiles. Image is a projection of a scene into a plane, usually represented as an array of brightness values. Image processing is nothing but a variety of operations performed by a machine vision system, in order to carry out a pre-assigned task. In completing that task, two-dimensional images or even three-dimensional scenes are analyzed to extract useful information related to the task. The outcome of the task may be decisions as to the presence or absence of the specific objects or the recognition of certain attributes of pictorial objects such as size, location relative to other objects, completeness, flawlessness, and so on. While the human vision system evolves in a self-programming fashion from the birth on, with a prior knowledge acquired by trial-and-error, computer vision requires individual programming of each particular task. The Laser scanner consists of a laser light source. The laser beam is passed over the object, i.e. fabric at high speed (approx. 6 km/sec) with the aid of polygonal reflector wheel. The scanning frequency is 3 KHz, i.e. the object is scanned 3000 times per second. Beam spot is visible between 0.1 and 2 mm. With the receiver scanner, a virtual area of the surface is focused on a receiver, again with the aid of polygonal reflector wheel or a swinging reflector and then scanned.