Employment Trends in Textiles and Apparel, 1973-2005

[Excerpt] The article “examines employment trends in the textile and apparel industries, reviewing the likely causes of both the recent historical and projected declines, their varied effects across occupations groups, and the response American producers have developed to adapt to the rapidly changing economic realities”

Review of Application of Artificial Neural Networks in Textiles and Clothing Industries over Last Decades

2010-2011 > Academic research: refereed > Chapter in an edited book (author

Optimal morphological filter design for fabric defect detection

This paper investigates the problem of automated defect detection for textile fabrics and proposes a new optimal morphological filter design method for solving this problem. Gabor Wavelet Network (GWN) is adopted as a major technique to extract the texture features of textile fabrics. An optimal morphological filter can be constructed based on the texture features extracted. In view of this optimal filter, a new semi-supervised segmentation algorithm is then proposed. The performance of the scheme is evaluated by using a variety of homogeneous textile images with different types of common defects. The test results exhibit accurate defect detection with low false alarm, thus confirming the robustness and effectiveness of the proposed scheme. In addition, it can be shown that the algorithm proposed in this paper is suitable for on-line applications. Indeed, the proposed algorithm is a low cost PC based solution to the problem of defect detection for textile fabrics. © 2005 IEEE.published_or_final_versio

Regularity analysis for patterned texture inspection

This paper considers regularity analysis for patterned texture material inspection. Patterned texture-like fabric is built on a repetitive unit of a pattern. Regularity is one of the most important features in many textures. In this paper, a new patterned texture inspection approach called the regular bands (RB) method is described. First, the properties of textures and the meaning of regularity measurements are presented. Next, traditional regularity analysis for patterned textures is introduced. Many traditional approaches such as co-occurrence matrices, autocorrelation, traditional image subtraction and hash function are based on the concept of periodicity. These approaches have been applied for image retrieval, image synthesis, and defect detection of patterned textures. In this paper, a new measure of periodicity for patterned textures is described. The Regular Bands method is based on the idea of periodicity. A detailed description of the RB method with definitions, procedures, and explanations is given. There is also a detailed evaluation using the Regular Bands of some patterned textures. Three kinds of patterned fabric samples are used in the evaluation and a high detection success rate is achieved. Finally, there is a discussion of the method and some conclusions. © 2006 IEEE.published_or_final_versio