Evaluation of fabric pilling using light projection and image analysis techniques

A new instrument based on light projection and image analysis techniques for assessing fabric pilling is presented. This system can automatically detect the pills from the successive sections of the fabric surface, which can make up for the limitation of both the gray level image-analysis techniques and laser triangulation techniques. The test of a large number of worsted wool fabric samples shows that it can objectively characterize the degree of pilling by using fuzzy sets and has good accordance with human visual inspection.