Yarn Separation for Structure Analysis of Textile Fabric on Three-dimensional Computed Tomography Image

In this paper, a yarn separation method is proposed for structure analysis of textile fabric on its three-dimensional (3-D) image obtained by an X-ray computed tomography (CT). In this method, the directions of the filaments, which a yarn consists of, at all the voxels of the 3-D image are firstly estimated 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 clustering the reconstructed filaments using a distance between two filaments. Consequently, each yarn of the textile fabric on the 3-D image is separated. The effectiveness of this method is confirmed by experimentally applying this method to 3-D image of a sample plain woven fabric, which is made of polyester two folded yarn. The each two folded yarn is correctly separated by this method.