Analysis and simulation of nonwoven textures

Nonwoven fabrics are widely used in a variety of different fields. They con sist of bonded fibers which are more or less randomly distributed (in parti cular they are not woven), and in all applications the homogeneity of the f abric is an important feature which is critical to the quality of the fabri c. We evaluate the homogeneity (cloudiness) by decomposing an image of a no nwoven. into different scales, evaluating the homogeneity on each scale and combining these results into a single number which represents a measure of the overall "cloudiness" of the fabric in the image. Simulation of images of nonwovens with a predefined degree of homogeneity (on each of the consid ered scales) is of importance because these images can be used to calibrate the image acquisition system. In particular we use Markov Random fields to generate the characteristic texture for each scale after first identifying the respective model parameters. We then combine these different images to yield an "artificial" image of a nonwoven.