Fabric defect detection based on saliency histogram features

Abstract In order to increase the automatic quality control level in the textile industry, depending on the big data collected by the Internet of things of the textile factories, this paper proposes a novel visual saliency–based defect detection algorithm, which has the capability of automatically detecting defect in both nonpatterned and patterned fabrics. The algorithm employs the histogram features extracted from the saliency maps to detect the fabric defects. The algorithm involves three main steps: (1) saliency map generation to highlight the defective regions and suppress the defect‐free regions, (2) saliency histogram features extraction and selection to obtain the feature vectors that can effectively discriminate between the defective and defect‐free fabric images, and (3) fabric defect detection using a two‐class support vector machine classifier that has been trained using sets of feature vectors extracted from defective and defect‐free fabric samples. Experimental results show that our method yields accurate detections, outperforming other state‐of‐the‐art algorithms.