Neural network approach for defect identification and classification on leather fabric

In this paper, an automated vision system is presented to detect and classify surface defects on leather fabric. Visual defects in a gray-level image are located through thresholding and morphological processing, and their geometric information is immediately reported. Three input feature sets are proposed and tested to find the best set to characterize five types of defects: lines, holes, stains, wears, and knots. Two multilayered perceptron models with one and two hidden layers are tested for the classification of defects. If multiple line defects are identified on a given image as a result of classification, a line combination test is conducted to check if they are parts of larger line defects. Experimental results on 140 defect samples show that two-layered perceptrons are better than three-layered perceptrons for this problem. The classification results of this neural network approach are compared with those of a decision tree approach. The comparison shows that the neural network classifier provides better classification accuracy despite longer training times.