The robustness of objective fabric pilling evaluation method

Previously, we proposed a new method to identify fabric pilling and objectively measure fabric pilling intensity based on the two-dimensional dual-tree complex wavelet reconstruction and neural network classification. Here we further evaluate the robustness of the method. Our results indicate that the pilling identification method is robust to significant variation in the brightness and contrast of the image, rotation of the image, and 2 ⁱ (i is an integer) times dilation of the image. The pilling feature vector developed to characterize the pilling intensity is robust to brightness change but is sensitive to large rotations of the image. As long as all fabric images are adjusted to have the same contrast level and the sample is illuminated from the same direction, the pilling feature vectors are comparable and can be used to classify the pilling intensity.