Extraction of yarn positional information from reconstructed yarn of three-dimensional image of textile fabric based on yarn model

In this paper, a novel method for analyzing a textile fabric structure is proposed to extract yarn positional information of the textile fabric from three-dimensional (3-d) image made of its X-ray computed tomography (CT) images. In order to extract the positional information, directions of filaments, which yarn consists of, on all the voxels are firstly estimated by correlating the voxels of the 3-d image with a filament model. Each filament is secondly reconstructed by clustering the voxels of the filaments using the estimated filament direction as a similarity. Then, each yarn is reconstructed by clustering the reconstructed filaments using a distance between two filaments as a dissimilarity. The each yarn positional information is finally extracted by correlating the reconstructed yarn with a 3-d yarn model. The effectiveness of the proposed method is discussed by experimentally applying the method to 3-d image of a sample plain woven fabric, which is made of a polyester two folded yarn.