Ultrasonic measurement and quantitative evaluation of seam puckering.

The degree of seam puckering, which is an important index of sewability of fabrics, has been usually evaluated only by visual judgement, but a more reliable, quantitative and objective method is necessary for making the standard and for automatic measurement. To this end, an evaluation method is proposed, which is based on the intensity of the ultrasonic wave reflected by fabrics. This method is higher in sensitivity than the laser beam method previously proposed by the present authors, and the resulted evaluation coincided with the usual visual one for more than 70% of many test cases.