Yarn Segmentation Based on Filament Direction in 3-D CT Images for Structure Analysis of Textile Fabric

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 obtained by its X-ray computed tomography (CT) images. In order to segment each yarn, the filament directions, which yarn consists of, at the voxels are firstly estimated by correlating the voxels with a filament model. Each filament is secondly reconstructed by clustering the voxels of the filaments using a product of the estimated filament direction vectors as a similarity. Then, each yarn is reconstructed by clustering the reconstructed filaments using a distance which is newly defined as a dissimilarity. Consequently, each yarn of the textile fabric is segmented. The effectiveness of this 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 this method