Image Analysis for Cotton Fibers Part II: Cross-Sectional Measurements

Cross-sectional analysis of cotton fibers provides direct, accurate measurements of fiber fineness and maturity, which are often regarded as the reference data for validating or calibrating other indirect measurements of these important cotton properties. Despite the importance, cross-sectional methods of using image analysis have not been broadly applied to cotton quality evaluations because of the tedious procedures for both preparing cotton samples and processing cross-sectional images. This paper illustrates image pro cessing procedures dedicated to cotton cross-sectional analysis for the purpose of increas ing the efficiency and accuracy of fiber separation and feature extraction. These proce dures greatly improve the automation of processing cotton cross-sectional images and increase the number of analyzable fibers per image. The cross-sectional data of cotton fibers also have good correlations with longitudinal data and data from the Advanced Fiber Information Systems.