Fuzz and pills evaluated on knitted textiles by image analysis

An automatic method has been developed to evaluate knitted fabrics for fuzz and pills with digital image analysis. The method uses Fourier analysis to filter the knitted stitch background from the fuzz and pills on the textile with an automatically generated Fourier mask. An evaluation feature is calculated from values enclosed in the power spectrum by the Fourier mask. The image analysis evaluation results are in agreement with evaluations from a textile expert group, thus suggesting that it is reasonable to use the method objectively to evaluate knitted fabrics.