Extraction of Yarn Positional Information from a Three-dimensional CT Image of Textile Fabric using Yarn Tracing with a Filament Model for Structure Analysis

In this paper, a novel method is proposed to extract the yarn positional information for the structure analysis of a textile fabric from its three-dimensional (3D) image obtained from its X-ray computed tomography (CT) images. In this paper, the sequence of the points on the yarn centerline is defined as the yarn positional information. The sequence is extracted by tracing the yarn. The yarn is traced using the yarn direction obtained by estimating the directions of its filaments and averaging the estimated filament directions. The filament direction is estimated by correlating the filament part in the 3D CT image with a 3D filament model. The trajectory of the yarn tracing corresponds to the yarn positional information. The validity of the proposed method is discussed by experimentally applying the proposed method to a 3D CT image of a plain knitted fabric. Furthermore, the usefulness is discussed through an experiment, in which the proposed method is applied to a 3D CT image of a plain woven fabric, which is made of a two-folded yarn.