Evaluating Carpet Appearance Loss: Surface Intensity and Roughness

Abstract

Changes in the appearance of carpet pile due to mechanical wear may be evaluated with respect to changes in global image properties, i.e., those based on one-dimensional characterizations of the intensity surface. This paper describes the application of gray scale image analysis to the measurement of microtexture variation and roughness or relief. We attempt to characterize microtexture with intensity mean, variance, skewness, and spatial co-occurrence. Surface relief is quantified as normalized intensity area and fractal dimension. Our samples show that simple mechanical wear generally entails a loss of relief and variation, but carpet construction has an important effect on the observed trends. Intensity mean and fractal dimension are promising candidates for automated evaluation of carpet appearance.