Automatic measurement of fabric shrinkage

A vision system for the automatic quantification of fabric geometric distortions has been implemented and tested. At the heart of this system is a customized image-processing algorithm capable of automatic detection of benchmarks from digitized images of fabric swatches. In the near future, other capabilities, such as automatic quantification of fabric smoothness, will also be incorporated. The system uses low-cost, commercial, off-the-shelf hardware components together with a customized, image-processing algorithm to capture digital images of pre-marked fabric swatches and to accurately measure the distance between the benchmarks before and after laundering. The system was tested on sets of 19-cm specimens. In every case, the developed algorithm successfully detected the benchmarks, with the computed dimensional changes and the manual measurements possessing a nearly perfect linear correlation.