Inspection of Cotton Woven Fabrics Produced by Ethiopian Textile Factories Through a Real-Time Vision-Based System

Abstract

Fabric is produced by the weaving process through the interlacement of warp and weft yarn or knitting process through the loop formation of yarn. During these processes, there is a possibility of fabric defect formation which hinders the acceptability by the fabric consumers. Ethiopian textile factories practiced a human inspection system, a traditional means of detecting fabric quality, for monitoring textile fabric defects. Manual fabric defect detection helps to instantly correct small defects, but it is time-consuming and results in human error due to fatigue and lack of concentration. Moreover, the accuracy of recognizing the defect highly depends on the mental status of the person that checks the defects. This initiated the development of a better fabric defect identification system that helps textile experts to detect fabric defects with better precision and speed. This study proposes a vision-based fabric inspection system for plain woven gray fabrics with a uniform texture. Accordingly, a comprehensive Fabric Defect Detection Database (FDDD) is constructed. The fabric significant features were calculated using a convolutional neural network (CNN) which is a state-of-the-art technology in image processing and task analysis. The experimental result of this study shows an average accuracy of about 89% in fabric defect recognition.