A novel approach to fabric defect detection using digital image processing

This paper presents a novel approach to the fast detection and extraction of fabric defects from the images of textile fabric. Automated visual inspection systems are much needed in the textile industry, especially when the quality control of products in textile industry is a significant problem. In the manual fault detection systems with trained inspectors, very less percentage of the defects are being detected while a real time automatic system can increase this to a maximum number. Thus, automated visual inspection systems play a great role in assessing the quality of textile fabrics. For the detection of fabric defects, we first decompose the image into its bit planes. The lower order bit planes are found to carry important information of the location and shape of defects. Then we find the exact location by means of mathematical morphology. The algorithm has been tested on a subset of TILDA
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image database with various visual qualities. Robustness with respect to the changes of the parameters of the algorithm has been evaluated.