A system for characterizing small fibers

A System for three-dimensional gauging of small fibers has been developed for process monitoring. The basic hardware consists of a pair of 2048 linear cameras orthogonally positioned, an IBM PC-compatible Pentium computer with frame grabber, a stepper motor and associated hardware for translating the fiber, a bright-field light source and special optics. The fiber is moved vertically past the two cameras as they scan. The computer acquires each scan line, processes it and then issues control signals to the stepper motor. Several different image processing operations are used to minimize the effects of illumination nonuniformity since fibers will sometimes have low contrast due to their small size. There are two sources of illumination variations, spatial and temporal which are processed independently. Image analysis is performed to provide three-dimensional fiber shape characteristics.