Yarn color measurement and reproduction by a multispectral imaging system

Conventionally, measuring and thus reproducing yarn color is mainly done in an indirect way, involving the preparation of yarns in card or even fabric forms, which consumes both time and labor. A direct yarn color measurement and reproduction method based on a multispectral imaging system would be one solution to avoid this problem. In this research, 100% raw cotton yarn hanks dyed using several reactive colorants, being different sample sets, were measured by both a spectrophotometer in yarn card form and a multispectral imaging system innovatively in yarn form itself, for back-prediction and fore-prediction matching comparisons. Experimental results showed that the multispectral imaging system can perform closed-loop color reproduction satisfactorily by yarn form color measurements, with color difference means all within industrial tolerance. This new method is capable of shortening the yarn specimen handling time and, more importantly, giving more accurate yarn color measurements without the influence of neighboring colors, so as to give improved coloration accuracy.