A machine vision system for on-line removal of contaminants in wool

The current techniques in the textile industry cannot efficiently remove polypropylenes, packing materials and black-pigmented fibres from wool. Their presence reduces the value of the textiles considerably because they cannot be dyed and used as wool. To solve the problem, a machine vision system, consisting of a colour line-scan CCD camera, frame grabber, host computer and air-jets, is investigated and presented in this paper, which can be used to identify and remove the contaminants in scoured wool. The key techniques, the image acquisition system, algorithms and mechatronic sorting system are described in detail. Finally the performance of the machine vision system is analysed and further research work is discussed.