Towards automated and objective assessment of fabric pilling

Pilling is a complex property of textile fabrics representing, for the final user, a non-desired feature to be controlled and measured by companies working in the textile industry. Traditionally, pilling is assessed by visually comparing the fabrics with reference to a set of standard images, thus often resulting in inconsistent quality control. A number of methods using machine vision has been proposed all over the world, almost all sharing the idea that pilling can be assessed by determining the number of pills or the area occupied by the pills on fabric surface. In the present work a different approach is proposed: instead of determining the number of pills, a machine vision-based procedure is devised with the aim of extracting a number of parameters characterizing the fabric. These are then used for training an Artificial Neural Network to automatically grading the fabrics in terms of pilling. Tested against a set of differently pilled fabrics, the method shows its effectiveness.