Automatic assessment of fabric smoothness

Due to its direct impact on the aesthetic appeal of apparels, a fabric´s propensity to wrinkle is one of its most important characteristics. As such, access to a quantitative method of assessing fabric smoothness is of the utmost importance to the textile community. In this paper, we describe a vision system for measuring fabric smoothness in terms of its image acquisition and analysis modules. The acquisition module is a laser-based surface profiling system that utilizes a smart camera to sense the 3-D topography of the fabric specimens. The image analysis module is comprised of methods based on anisotropic diffusion and the facet model for characterizing the different edge information that ultimately relate to a specimen´s degree of wrinkling. Promising preliminary results are included.