Tactile perception of fabrics with an artificial finger compared to human sensing

The assessment of fabric quality is highly dependent on the human tactile sense, which is affected by many factors. There is currently no approach to measure fabric quality directly. To build the relationship between tactile perception and fabric texture, vibration data obtained from a biomimetic sensor while scanning fabric surfaces were recorded and compared with the human judgments. Human subjective sensing experiments were performed with 20 volunteers by classifying texture into 10 grades according to three dimensions: Rough–Smooth, Coarse–Fine and Complex–Uniform. The vibrations and the coefficient of friction (COF) between the skin and fabric were measured using an artificial finger and a tribometer as the artificial finger scanned across various fabrics. Five characteristic values were extracted based on features of the fabric texture from the vibration data: peak average (PA), peak ratio (PR), spectral centroid (SC), power (P) and Shannon entropy (SE).These feature values were evaluated by comparison with those from human sensing experiments. It was found that P, SC, SE and COF could characterize the perceived Rough–Smooth, Coarse–Fine, Complex–Uniform and surface comfort, respectively.