Objective Measurement of Wool Fibre Fineness Using 2-D Gabor Filter

There is a huge demand for objective on-farm techniques, which would enable identification of the ‘outliers’ of sheep for the purpose of breeding selection, reducing the fineness (or diameter) of woolgrowers’ flocks with greater confidence, and maintaining the uniform quality throughout the wool clips. In this study, the concept of texture analysis based on Gabor filtering is employed and textural features are extracted from the images of wool staples with different fineness. It is justified by the experiments that those textural features are rotation invariant and also sensitive to the fineness of wool staples and efficient in discrimination of wool staples with different fineness. Since it requires minimum manual operations, this approach has a great potential to be applied on farm or in shearing shed.