Abstract

It is important for consumer and producer to develop the objective categorization of blackness of fabrics. In this study, we carried out the sensory vision test on eight black fabrics for women's formal dresses. A survey for visual impression of fabrics was carried out by 21 judges, using the 13 bipolar attributes to describe the overall aspects of fabrics. We also measured the mechanical properties corresponding to fabric traverse structure, surface aesthetics and optical properties. To analyze the image characteristics, we measured anisotropy and the frequency of textures in the sense of digital image processing. Anisotropy is derived by the histogram of edge direction detected by the Sobel edge detecter. The image analysis in this study can be thought to involve and to depict various fabric factors comprehensively which are relevant to the visual evaluation for the fabric blackness, formality and gloss. We could propose a novel method to categorize blackness of fabrics by linking the outcome of the image analysis with the results of the visual sensory test.