Fabric defect detection using local contrast deviations

Defect inspection is a vital step for quality assurance in fabric production. The development of a fully automated fabric defect detection system requires robust and efficient fabric defect detection algorithms. The inspection of real fabric defects is particularly challenging due to delicate features of defects complicated by variations in weave textures and changes in environmental factors (e.g., illumination, noise, etc.). Based on characteristics of fabric structure, an approach of using local contrast deviation (LCD) is proposed for fabric defect detection in this paper. LCD is a parameter used to describe features of the contrast difference in four directions between the analyzed image and a defect-free image of the same fabric, and is used with a bilevel threshold function for defect segmentation. The validation tests on the developed algorithms were performed with fabric images from TILDA's Textile Texture Database and captured by a line-scan camera on an inspection machine. The experimental results show that the proposed method has robustness and simplicity as opposed to the approach of using modified local binary patterns (LBP).