Dynamic Measurement of Foam-Sized Yarn Properties from Yarn Sequence Images

Unlike the normal sizing method, the foam sizing had been proven to be a low-add-on technology. To investigate the effect of foam sizing, film thickness, sized-yarn evenness, and size penetration rate were necessary to evaluate the performances of foam-sized yarns. However, the conventional image analysis of sized-yarn cross sections primarily relied on artificial testing with a low efficiency. This paper proposed a novel dynamic method to measure the sized-yarn properties including film thickness, sized-yarn evenness, and size penetration rate based on yarn sequence images captured from a moving yarn. A method of dynamic threshold module was adopted to obtain threshold for segmenting yarns in the sequence images. K-means clustering algorithm was applied to segment pixels of the images into yarn and background. To further remove burrs and noise in the images, two judgment templates were carried out to extract the information of yarn core. The film thickness, sized-yarn evenness, and size penetration rate were measured based on the yarn core of each frame in sequence images. In order to compare with the experimental results of the dynamic method, the yarn properties of the same samples were tested by static and artificial testing. Results revealed that the proposed method could efficiently and accurately detect the film thickness, sized-yarn evenness, and size penetration rate