Abstract:
Measuring the length and the width of a sample of coir fibres manually is a time
consuming and labour intensive task. With the aim of developing an imaging system
based on machine vision, automatic computing of length and width were
investigated by processing a set of scanned images of coir fibre samples. Two
algorithms were developed using a line searching technique based on the pixel
arrangement, in order to measure the length and width of the fibres.
Results showed that the automatically calculated lengths and actual length are
linearly correlated with a correlation coefficient of 0.99. The overall error of the
length calculation is ±6.4 mm. Over 75% of fibre lengths can be measured within a
percentage error of 1.5%. However, the calculation of the width of the fibres did not
provide satisfactory results since the estimated error value ±0.05 mm is quite high
compared to the width of the fibres (∼0.3 mm). Although the percentage error is
high for the estimation of the width, the results indicate that the computational
technique could be improved and used as an alternative to the manual techniques.
