A novel objective fabric pilling evaluation method based on the photometric stereo algorithm

Abstract

The pilling grade is one of the important indexes to evaluate the quality of fabric; the traditional method for pilling evaluation is based on manual operation, which is subjective. In this paper, a self-developed system is established and a photometric stereo-based three-dimensional (3D) acquisition method for pilling evaluation has been demonstrated. Firstly, a 3D surface model is obtained by using photometric stereo, mapping a 3D model to a two-dimensional image; the gray value is used to represent the depth value of the fabric surface and the pilling segmentation is realized by the Otsu threshold method after filtering the fabric texture by the relative total variance algorithm. The pilling number and pilling area are used as eigenvectors for pilling classification using the support vector machine. Finally, the classification accuracy of the pilling grade was 95.9%. For pilling evaluation, the developed system and method can be considered reliable and effective according to the experimental results.