Expression of individual woven yarn of textile fabric by clustering three dimensional CT image using mahalanobis distance

In this paper, a method to express individual woven yarns is proposed for structure analysis of a textile fabric with its three-dimensional (3D) X-ray computed tomography (CT) image. In this method, the voxels of the 3D CT image are segmented into each yarn by using the yarn positional information, which is a sequence of the yarn center points. The positional information is obtained by tracing the yarn. The yarn is traced by sequentially estimating its center and orientation. The center and orientation are estimated by correlating the voxel values with a solid model of the yarn. The voxels of the 3D CT image are segmented into each yarn based on a clustering method using the Mahalanobis distance between the voxel and the obtained yarn positional information. Each individual yarn is expressed by the volume-rendering technique with the segmented voxels. The effectiveness of the proposed yarn expression method is confirmed by experimentally applying this method to the 3D image of a plain knitted fabric.