High Volume Measurements of Cotton Maturity by a Customized Microscopic System

Information about cotton maturity is desirable to cotton breeders and growers for cotton enhancement and to textile manufacturers for quality control. This paper reports on the development of a dedicated system that facilitates direct, fast and high volume measurements of cotton maturity from longitudinal views, and the experimental results. The system examines cotton fibers in a projected 2-D image to measure the variations in fiber width, which reveal the severity of fiber convolutions, and the fiber translucence that reflects the thickness of the secondary wall. This paper describes the methodology for extracting these features and how they relate to cotton maturity.