Fast processing of foreign fiber images by image blocking

AbstractIn the textile industry, it is always the case that cotton products are constitutive of many types of foreign fibers which affect the overall quality of cotton products. As the foundation of the foreign fiber automated inspection, image process exerts a critical impact on the process of foreign fiber identification. This paper presents a new approach for the fast processing of foreign fiber images. This approach includes five main steps, image block, image pre-decision, image background extraction, image enhancement and segmentation, and image connection. At first, the captured color images were transformed into gray-scale images; followed by the inversion of gray-scale of the transformed images ; then the whole image was divided into several blocks. Thereafter, the subsequent step is to judge which image block contains the target foreign fiber image through image pre-decision. Then we segment the image block via OSTU which possibly contains target images after background eradication and image strengthening. Finally, we connect those relevant segmented image blocks to get an intact and clear foreign fiber target image. The experimental result shows that this method of segmentation has the advantage of accuracy and speed over the other segmentation methods. On the other hand, this method also connects the target image that produce fractures therefore getting an intact and clear foreign fiber target image