Investigation of image registration method for the multi-directional image fusion of woven fabrics

Traditional single-side scanning or single-vision image acquisition methods have the limitation of incomplete information caused by the existence of blind spots. To collect the complete texture information of fabric images, a new multi-vision image acquisition and the related fusion method is developed to solve this problem. However, linear addition of image sequences acquired from multiple directions cannot achieve a good result of image fusion, it is necessary to conduct the image fusion based on the image registration between images at pixel level. Therefore, a new multi-directional digital image acquisition system for woven fabrics is established in this article; one set of image fusion algorithm based on image registration is proposed for the image enhancement of fabric. Fabric texture images are digitized by means of multi-directional vision imaging instead of unidirectional imaging, the structural information of fabric texture could be enhanced using image registration and fusion technology and the indexing and localization of texture corresponding points could be controlled using matching points or control points. Our experimental results show that the proposed method could be used to merge the effective information from the multi-directional vision images completely, it has the potential application for the rendering of woven fabrics using image driven virtual reality enhancement.