New objective system of pilling evaluation for various types of fabrics

Image analysis methods are widely used tools for an objective pilling evaluation. However, due to their intrinsic limitations, simple image analysis of digital photographs is not a suitable procedure for the pilling evaluation of fabrics with complex structures and distinct patterns. Generally, a fabric pattern or a complex fabric structure have presented significant problem to the pills detection. This paper describes a system of the objective pilling evaluation of unicolor fabrics and even fabrics with complex patterns. The main points of the pilling evaluation system include a 3D fabric surface reconstruction from shading based on gradient field method, using image analysis tools for the pills detection and an estimation of an objective pilling grade. In order to enable the estimation of the objective pilling grade, a relationship between the pilling grades obtained by a subjective method and selected pill characteristics was specified using a linear regression model. The method was tested on a set of different fabrics and estimated pilling grades were compared with subjective pilling grades of the samples. Results showed that the proposed method is suitable and reliable tool for the objective pilling evaluation of various types of fabrics.