EVALUATING CARPET APPEARANCE LOSS - SURFACE INTENSITY AND ROUGHNESS

Changes in the appearance of carpet pile due to mechanical wear may be evaluated with respect to changes in global image properties, i.e., t hose based on one-dimensional characterizations of the intensity surfa ce. This paper describes the application of gray scale image analysis to the measurement of microtexture variation and roughness or relief. We attempt to characterize microtexture with intensity mean, variance, skewness, and spatial co-occurrence. Surface relief is quantified as normalized intensity area and fractal dimension. Our samples show that simple mechanical wear generally entails a loss of relief and variati on, but carpet construction has an important effect on the observed tr ends. Intensity mean and fractal dimension are promising candidates fo r automated evaluation of carpet appearance.