Yarn Segmentation from 3-D Voxel Data for Analysis of Textile Fabric Structure

In this paper, a novel method for analyzing a textile fabric structure is proposed to segment each yarn of the textile fabric from voxel data made out of its X-ray computed tomography (CT) images. In order to segment the each yarn, directions of fibers, of which yarn consists, are firstly estimated by correlating the voxel with a fiber model. Second, each fiber is reconstructed by clustering the voxel of the fiber using the estimated fiber direction as a similarity. Then, each yarn is reconstructed by clustering the reconstructed fibers using a distance which is newly defined as a dissimilarity. Consequently, each yarn of the textile fabric is segmented from the voxel data. The effectiveness of the proposed method is confirmed by experimentally applying the method to voxel data of a sample plain woven fabric, which is made of polyester two folded yarn. The each two folded yarn is correctly segmented by the proposed method.