Development of real-time vision-based fabric inspection system

Quality inspection of textile fabric products is an important problem for fabric manufacturers. This paper presents an automatic vision-based system for the quality control of web textile fabrics. Typical web material is 1-3 m wide and is driven with speeds ranging from 20 to 200 m/min. At present, the quality inspection process is manually performed by experts. However, they cannot detect more than 60% of the overall defects for the fabric if it is moving faster than 30 m/min. To increase the quality and homogeneity of fabrics, an automated visual inspection system is needed for better productivity. Currently, the existing inspection systems are too expensive for small companies. In this paper, a PC-based real-time inspection system is proposed with benefits of low cost and high detection rate. The proposed algorithm showed good results for several types of fabric defects.