The fabric defect detection based on CIE L*a*b* color space using 2-D Gabor filter

A detection algorithm based on CIE L*a*b* color space is proposed to detect various colorful fabric defects more accurately and avoid the error detection resulted from losing image information of graying. CIE L*a*b* color space is transformed from XYZ space via nonlinear transformation of RGB space. First, three features including the brightness characteristics L*, color information of a* and b* which are used to form 2-D Gabor filter in a complex number can be acquired. Genetic algorithm with the objective function in a form of energy is adopted to select optimal Gabor filter parameters. Second, filter built by flawless image is used to filter the corresponding drawbacks of image. Third, ultimate results are obtained through sliding threshold segmentation method and properly de-noising. The experiment success rate is 95.83%, which indicate that this method can detect diversiform colorful fabric defect accurately.