A customized microscopic system for high volume measurements of cotton maturity.
Bugao Xu, Wenting Yu, Patricia Damian Bel, Eric Francois HEQUET, Bobby Wyatt · 2007
Cotton maturity, which refers to the degree of development of the fiber wall relative to its perimeter, is one of the main cotton quality attributes because it directly or indirectly affects most of the other cotton fiber properties. Mature fibers usually possess greater strength and better resilience. The presence of immature fibers may cause excessive fiber waste during processing and may lower yarn strength. Immature fibers have also been recognized as one of the principal causes of the formation of nep. Due to their relatively low dye affinity, neps easily show up as imperfections in a dyed fabric. Hence, information about cotton maturity is desirable to cotton breeders and growers for cotton enhancement and to textile manufacturers for quality control. This paper will report on the development of a dedicated system that facilitates direct, fast and high-volume measurements of cotton maturity from longitudinal views, and the experiment results. Cotton fibers are convoluted along their longitudinal axes. Therefore, a projected 2-D image of a cotton fiber has large variations in fiber width. Because of the relationship between fiber convolutions and fiber maturity, our hypothesis is that the ratio of the maximum width to the minimum width of a fiber ribbon could be used as a maturity indicator. Another important factor related to cotton maturity is fibers translucence because the translucence with a transmitting light microscope is dictated by the thickness of the secondary cell wall. This paper will describe the methodology for extracting these features from digitized images and how they relate to cotton maturity.