A computer vision-based system for automatic detection of misarranged warp yarns in yarn-dyed fabric. Part I: continuous segmentation of warp yarns

In textile and garment industries, misarranged warp yarns of yarn-dyed fabrics disorganize the layout of fabrics and lead to poor product quality. This series of studies aims to develop a computer vision-based system for automatic detection of misarranged color warp yarns in terms of high efficiency and good accuracy. Four main parts are included in this series of studies: warp yarn segmentation, fabric image stitching, warp regional segmentation, and yarn layout proofing. This paper proposes a continuous segmentation method of warp yarns to detect the misarranged color warp yarns for yarn-dyed fabrics automatically, which is the foundation of the developed computer vision-based system. The proposed framework consists of two main components: warp yarn segmentation and fabric image stitching. Firstly, the sequence images of a fabric stripe are captured using a designed offline image acquisition platform. Secondly, the warp yarns in the sequence images are segmented by a sub-image projection-based method successively. Thirdly, the sequence images are stitched by a yarn-template matching method based on their warp segmentation results. Finally, the continuous segmentation result of warp yarns is saved for the further processing of warp regional segmentation and color warp layout proofing. The proposed method has been evaluated on 720 fabric images of five fabric examples with plain and 2/2 twill, and experimental results show that the proposed method can realize the continuous segmentation of warp yarns in yarn-dyed fabrics with the yarn segmentation accuracy of 97.43% and image stitching accuracy of 99.53%.