Abstract
Detection of foreign matter in cleaned cotton is instrumental to accurately grading cotton quality, which in turn impacts the marketability of the cotton. Current grading systems return estimates of the amount of foreign matter present, but provide no information about the identity of the contaminants. This paper explores the use of pulsed thermographic analysis to detect and identify cotton foreign matter. The design and implementation of a pulsed thermographic analysis system is described. A sample set of 240 foreign matter and cotton lint samples were collected. Hand-crafted waveform features and frequency-domain features were extracted and analyzed for statistical significance. Classification was performed on these features using linear discriminant analysis and support vector machines. Using waveform features and support vector machine classifiers, detection of cotton foreign matter was performed with 99.17% accuracy. Using frequency-domain features and linear discriminant analysis, identification was performed with 90.00% accuracy. These results demonstrate that pulsed thermographic imaging analysis produces data which is of significant utility for the detection and identification of cotton foreign matter.
Highlights
During harvest and transportation, cotton is contaminated by foreign matter
The most common type of foreign matter is botanical matter from the cotton plants: leaf fragments, hulls, stems, seeds, seed coats, and so on; followed by foreign fibers and textiles made of cotton, plastic, and jute; and least common are inorganic debris and oily substances [1]
Other types of foreign matter may be broken into smaller fragments and not removed; leaf fragments are the most prevalent of these
Summary
The most common type of foreign matter is botanical matter from the cotton plants: leaf fragments, hulls, stems, seeds, seed coats, and so on; followed by foreign fibers and textiles made of cotton, plastic, and jute; and least common are inorganic debris and oily substances [1]. Cotton may be contaminated with baling twine, fragments of module cover, or grease and oil from machinery. Exogenous debris such as windblown paper and plastic fragments are occasionally incorporated during harvest. Much of this debris, especially large pieces of debris such as seeds and stems, is removed during the ginning and cleaning process. Cotton containing a high proportion of foreign matter results in defects in textiles, as well as interfering with processing equipment by introducing oil and dust [2]
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