Theoretical Analysis for Short Fiber Contents in Dual-Beard Cotton Samples

The short fiber content (SFC) in raw cotton is an extremely important attribute in the modern cotton classing system, because of its impact on the quality of yarn manufacturing. However, the current SFC measuring methods are costly, time-consuming and tedious for accurate and quick testing. This study was focused on develop a new way to calculate a weight-based SFC (SFC_w) from a dual-beard specimen via image-processing and bell-shaped fibrogram modeling techniques. A sample from a cotton sliver was clamped and combed in the opposite directions to form two tapered fringes, and then scanned on a desktop scanner to generate a dual-beard image (DBI). The grayscale values in each column of the DBI were accumulated to derive a bell-shaped fibrogram representing the fiber quantity distributions over the distance from the fibrogram center. Based on the fibrogram, a special hierarchical model was proposed to calculate SFC_w in two different length limits—12.7mm and 16mm defined respectively in the U.S. and China’s specifications. In the hierarchical model, the bell-shaped fibrogram was iteratively divided into sub-fibrograms, from which a series of SFCs could not calculated. The significant correlations were found between the SFC_ws from DBI and AFIS. As shown in the Bland-Altman plots, a good agreement existed between the two sets of SFC_ws, demonstrating DBI’s potential to be an accurate, rapid and portable approach for measuring SFC_w.