A Novel On-line Textile Color Measurement System

In the fields of coloring, printing and dyeing, color is one of the most important indicators for product quality evaluating. It is helpful to monitor and control color quality in time if on-line measurement is used in production process. Textiles vibrate irregularly when moving along the production line and most materials have texture, which make it difficult to measure color accurately. To solve this problem, both illumination uniformity and sampling aperture size should be studied. In this paper we designed a novel on-line textile color measurement system. In the system, the lighting path was designed with a four-edge light pipe, which achieved the illumination uniformity of 90%. The suitable size of sampling aperture was found by comparing the influences caused by measuring distance changing and surface texture when using sampling apertures of different sizes. Finally, the system has been tested for repeatability of color measurement and the result was 0.02, which showed that the performance of the system has already met the requirement for on-line textile color measurement. Compared with similar foreign products of the same level, this system has simpler structure and lower price.