Development of Cotton Fiber Quality Sensor

ABSTRACT: Multispectral sensor for in-situ cotton fiber quality measurement was developed at Texas A&M University. Results of testing the sensor with lint cotton to determine micronaire were promising. Objectives of the study reported in this paper were to automate the image acquisition of the sensor and evaluate performance of the sensor in measuring fiber quality of seed cotton. A ruggedized prototype of the multispectral fiber quality sensor was built for installing on a cotton harvester. An automatic filter wheel was added into the sensor system. The filter wheel could be controlled by software to change optical filters of the sensor so that images at selected wavebands could be acquired automatically. Thirty-six seed cotton samples were collected from a 90-acre field, at Texas A&M University IMPACT Center. The samples were measured using the multispectral sensor. The sensor takes images of the samples at three near infrared wavebands and one visible band. The visible image was used to exclude the pixels that represent anything other than cotton fibers before determining fiber quality by the NIR images. After being measured by the sensor, the samples were ginned and the lint quality (HVI and AFIS) was analyzed.  A model was developed by comparing the measurement results from the multispectral sensor and from HVI and AFIS analysis.