An automated inspection system for textile fabrics based on Gabor filters

This paper studies the application of advanced computer image processing techniques for solving the problem of automated defect detection for textile fabrics. A new defect detection scheme is proposed, which consists of an odd symmetric real-valued Gabor filter, an even symmetric real-valued Gabor filter and one smoothing filter. In developing the scheme, the Gabor filters are designed on the basis of the texture features extracted optimally from a non-defective fabric image by using a Gabor wavelet network (GWN). The performance of the proposed defect detection scheme is evaluated off-line by using a set of fabric images taken from a database consisting of a wide variety of homogeneous fabric images. The results exhibit accurate defect detection with low false alarms, thus showing the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed scheme. To evaluate the performance of the proposed defect detection scheme further, real-time tests are conducted by using a prototyped automated defect detection system. The experimental results obtained further confirm the efficiency, effectiveness and robustness of the proposed detection scheme.