Expression of individual woven yarn of textile fabric based on yarn positional information extracted from its three dimensional CT image

In this paper, an expression method of each individual woven yarn of textile fabric is proposed for structure analysis of textile fabric on its three-dimensional (3D) image obtained by X-ray computed tomography (CT) images. In this method, the voxels of the 3D CT image is segmented into each yarn based on the yarn positional information, which is the sequence of the yarn center points. In order to extract the yarn positional information, the directions of the filaments are firstly estimated at all the voxels of the 3D CT image by correlating the voxel values with a filament model. Each filament is secondly reconstructed by connecting the voxels of the filaments based on the estimated filament directions. Each yarn is then reconstructed by binding up the reconstructed filaments using a newly defined distance between two filaments. Finally, the yarn positional information is obtained by thinning the reconstructed yarns. The voxels of the 3D CT image is segmented into each yarn based on a newly defined dissimilarity to the extracted yarn positional information. Using the segmented voxels, each individual yarn is expressed with volume rendering. The effectiveness of the proposed yarn expression method is discussed by experimentally applying this method to 3D image of a plain knitted fabric.