Automated system for detection and classification
of leather defects
Antonella Branca
Maria Tafuri
Giovanni Attolico
Arcangelo Distante
Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche
Instituto Elaborazione Segnali ed Immagini
Via Amendola 166/5
70126 Bari, Italy
E-mail: attolico@iesi.ba.cnr.it
1 Introduction
Inspection is the process of determining if a product devi-
ates from a given set of specifications. It can be done to
evaluate the quality of materials or products before the start
~receiving inspection!, at intermediate stages ~process in-
spection!, or at the end ~product inspection! of a production
process. The proposed system addresses the receiving in-
spection of raw leather to supply the manufacturing process
with information about location and classification of de-
fects, enabling better results in terms of both reduced use-
less remnants ~dregs! and increased quality of the final
products.
Automated inspection is becoming an essential part of
manufacturing processes since human inspection often does
not provide constant and consistent performance due to fa-
tigue or lack of experience.
Inspection decisions are often based on superficial prop-
erties, therefore machine vision is considered a natural tool
for an automated inspection system. Most defect descrip-
tions are vague and subjective, however, and surface char-
acterizations ~which can involve geometric features, dimen-
sions, color, brightness, wrinkledness! are complex and
dependent on such external conditions as light and point of
view. In general, the formalization of visual inspection is
not an easy task.
Several automated inspection systems using machine vi-
sion have been proposed in literature for objects or materi-
als with different natures: liquid crystal displays1 ~LCDs!,
vehicles after crash,2 ground metal,3 bearing rollers,4 glass
panels,5 plastic cosmetic bottles,6 coated sheet steel,7 silk
crapes,8 hardwood lumber,9 and aluminum strips.10
Successful vision inspection systems can be based on
the analysis of texture because most natural surfaces and
defects exhibit rich textural contents. Nevertheless, just a
few applications of texture analysis to automated inspection
problems have been proposed. These applications include
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Abstract. A leather inspection system based on visual textural proper-
ties of the material surface is presented. Defects are isolated from the
complex and nonhomogeneous background, analyzing their oriented
structure. The patterns to be analyzed are represented in an appropriate
parameter space using a neural network, in this way, a parameter vector
is associated to each different textured region in the original image. Fi-
nally a filter process, based on knowledge about the parameter vectors
representing the leather without defects, detects and classifies any ab-
normality. The resulting system is flexible and does not depend on di-
mensions, structure, and color of defects. © 1996 Society of Photo-Optical
Instrumentation Engineers.
Subject terms: texture analysis; texture classification; oriented structures; param-
eter space; vectorial bases; neural network; leather inspection.
Paper 23125 received Dec. 14, 1995; revised manuscript received July 8, 1996;
accepted for publication July 12, 1996.
defect detection in images of textiles,11 in textured
images,12,13 in lumber wood,9 automated inspection of car-
pet wear,14 and of automobile paints.15
Leather has not received much attention. As a natural
material, it does exhibit a wide range of visual appearances
~it is nonhomogeneous in color, thickness, brightness, and
finally in wrinkledness!, depending on the original skin
characteristics and on the subsequent curing processes. The
defects, too, often due to natural reasons, lack a well-
defined classification and description in terms of visual
cues. Therefore the task of separating defects from back-
ground is hard.
Texture, in particular oriented texture, can help in man-
aging such a complex situation. One efficient way to de-
scribe textural oriented structures was suggested by Rao
and Schunck.16 It relies on the computation of the orienta-
tion field from the original image. An orientation vector
field can be evaluated, in each point of an image with ori-
ented texture, as a 2-D vector having a direction corre-
sponding to the dominant local orientation of gradient and
the length proportional to its coherence ~degree of isot-
ropy!, both evaluated in a neighborhood of the point.
To interpret such a rich information, we propose to
project the orientation vector field in a suitable parameter
space using a neural network. In this way, it can be repre-
sented as a set of projection coefficients ~texture param-
eters! on a set of basis vectors ~elementary texture vectors!
spanning a vector subspace where the vector fields associ-
ated to the considered defects can be defined. Defect detec-
tion and classification are performed using these coeffi-
cients.
The transformation from a vector space to a parameter
space leads to a computationally efficient scheme for pat-
tern analysis. Since the basis vectors used for projections
can be neither orthogonal nor complete, we use the mini-
mum difference between the original field and the linear
combination of the basis vectors as a global optimization
© 1996 Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers 3485
 Branca et al.: Automated system for detection and classification . . .
criterion for determining the final coefficients.
This optimization is efficiently performed through a neu-
ral network initialized to recognize a limited number of
patterns ~the basis vector fields!. The parameters provided
by the neural network are able to identify a broader family
of patterns analyzing the estimates of their projection coef-
ficients.
In Sec. 2 oriented field modeling and a method for its
computation are presented. Section 3 describes the param-
eter space modeling and the neural network implementa-
tion. The problem of defect detection and classification on
leather is treated in Sec. 4. Finally, Sec. 5 shows experi-
mental results obtained on several defects on different
kinds of leather.
2 Oriented Flow Field Modeling
The first step in the proposed analysis of oriented textures
is the estimation of the associated orientation field, based
on the gradient of Gaussian filtering of the textured
image.16 The orientation field of an image I(x,y) comprises
the angle image and the coherence image. The former ~rep-
resenting the dominant local orientation! is computed over
a neighborhood of each point from the orientations of gra-
dients evaluated on the original image smoothed using a
Gaussian filter.
With G i j exp(i u i j ) as the polar representation of the gra-
dient vector at point (i, j), we can estimate the dominant
gradient direction umn at the center (m,n) of an N3N
neighborhood as
i51 ( j51 G i j sin 2u i j
( i5N j5N 2 2 played by the reference system used for expressing the ba-
1
u mn 5 arctan i5N j5N 2 . ~1!
2 ( i51 ( j51 G i j cos2 2u i j
The dominant local direction is given by umn 1p/2 since the
gradient vector is perpendicular to the direction of anisot-
ropy.
The coherence measures locally the accord between im-
age gradient orientations. It is essentially based on normal-
izing and projecting the gradient vectors of a given neigh-
borhood on the local dominant orientation. If these vectors
are coherent, their normalized projections will be close to
1; otherwise they will tend to cancel producing results close
to 0.
With umn as the dominant gradient direction at point
(m,n) estimated at the previous step in a neighborhood W
of prescribed size, the measure of coherence in that point is
given by
( ~ i, j ! Pw i G i j cos ~ u mn 2 u i j !i
r mn 5G mn . ~2!
( ~ i, j ! Pw G i j
In this way, from an image of N pixels, the method
recovers an N-dimensional vector field V(x,y) composed
of 2-D vectors having as their directions the dominant local
orientation and a length proportional to the local coherence.
3 Parameter Space Modeling
A vector field can be analyzed using its representation as a
set of M projection coefficients $ c i % i51,...,M ~texture param-
eters! on N-dimensional basis vectors $ c i (x,y) % i51,...,M ~el-
ementary texture vectors! spanning a vector space where
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the vector fields associated to defects can be defined. The
coefficients of these projections are the parameters by
means of which texture classification can be performed.
To represent a vector V(x,y), either exactly or in some
optimal sense, by projecting it onto a chosen set of vectors
$ c i (x,y) % we must find the projection coefficients c i mak-
ing the linear combination of the basis [H(x,y)] either
identical to or with minimum distance from V(x,y). The
desired set of coefficients is determined minimizing the
squared norm of the difference vector:
E5 i V~ x,y ! 2H ~ x,y !i 2 . ~3!
This quadratic error function E reaches its global minimum
only when its partial derivatives with respect to any of the
M coefficients c i equal 0. Satisfying this condition for each
c i generates a system of M simultaneous equations in M
unknowns:
S D
U(
~ x,y !
V~ x,y ! c i ~ x,y ! 5 ( k51
~ x,y !
M
( c k c k~ x,y ! U
c i ~ x,y ! . ~4!
Iterative methods do generally perform better than direct
methods in solving systems of simultaneous equations.
Their computational load scale better with the number of
equations and they exhibit greater precision and stability.
Therefore, the network used by our approach is based on an
iterative method.
A central role in the estimation of this projection is
sis orientation fields. Moving the reference system inside a
single region with homogeneous textural content may pro-
duce, especially if a singular point of the orientation field
belongs to that region, different parameter vectors. This
makes necessary to interleave the classification process
with the segmentation process: the evaluation of texture
parameters supports the region growing by providing the
measure of similarity between patches while the amount of
growth of a seed patch does validate or confute the classi-
fication results. The resulting scheme iterates the following
two steps alternatively:
1. The classification step consists of picking up a patch
~the seed patch for the following step! not yet classi-
fied and estimating its textural parameters.
2. The segmentation ~patch-growing! step consists of at-
tempting to extend the same classification to neigh-
boring patches. If this process is successful all the
patches belonging to the resulting large region are
associated to the same classification parameters ~es-
timated for the seed patch!. Otherwise they all remain
unclassified ~therefore available for inclusion in other
growing regions!.
3.1 Classification
The optimal estimation of the projection coefficients solv-
ing system 4 has been found using the four-layer neural
network proposed in Ref. 17.
The input field vectors are given as input to the M neu-
rons of the first layer, weighted for each of them by the
 Branca et al.: Automated system for detection and classification . . .
vectors of the corresponding basis field. The output of this
first layer, the dot products between the input field and the
basis fields, is fed to the second layer.
At the same time, the fourth layer computes the dot
products between the linear combination of the basis vec-
tors ~evaluated by the third layer using the current estimate
of $ c i % i51,...,M ! and the basis fields. Also these dot products
are fed back to the second layer, which, comparing its in-
puts, evaluates the updated estimate of the c i .
The weights on this second layer—initialized to 0 and
updated iteratively by an amount Di , depending on the dif-
ference between the feed forward signal ~the level of activ-
ity of the first layer! and the feedback signal ~the level of
activity of the fourth layer!—provide, at the stable state, the
desired optimal coefficients representing the texture param-
eters of the considered image. On 838 windows, the con-
vergence requires 300 to 400 iterations ~with a time of the
order of 1023 s!. The window size must be choosen as a
trade-off between accuracy ~434 windows produce untrust-
able results! and computational load ~16316 windows re-
quires more than 2000 iterations!.
The weight adjustment rule is
1 ]E
D i 52 5 (
2 ] c i ~ x,y !
V ~ x,y ! c i ~ x,y !
2 (
~ x,y !
FS (
M
k51
D G
c k c k ~ x,y ! c i ~ x,y ! ,
and the iterative rule for updating the coefficients is
c i 5c i 1D i .
The equilibrium state of the network ~reached when all
Di 50! corresponds to the minimum of the cost function E,
where all the partial derivative of E with respect to the
adjustable weights are null. In this stable state, the weights
of the second layer represent the optimal coefficients
$ c i % i51,...,M for projecting V(x,y) onto the set of elemen-
tary functions $ c i (x,y) % i51,...,M .
3.2 Segmentation
To build the final defect map the input image must be seg-
mented into large regions each with its own distinct texture.
Since small patches belonging to the same large region,
with homogeneous textural contents, do not produce neces-
sarily the same coefficient vectors when analyzed locally,
each with respect to its own reference system, an accept-
able segmentation cannot be obtained by merging patches
solely on the base of a straight comparison of their param-
eter vectors evaluated by the classification.
A region-growing method has been designed that at-
tempts to extend seed patches if their parameters are able to
describe the textural contents of their neighborhoods. The
reference system is kept centered on the seed patch during
all the growing trials. This provides a meaningful estima-
tion of textural similarity and better final results.
The region-growing algorithm is quite simple. It starts
from a temporary classified patch ~seed patch! and consid-
ers a set of surrounding patches ~having the same dimen-
sion of the seed patch and the center lying on its border!
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that still need to be classified. They are allowed to overlap
no more than half of their size. The orientation field in each
patch is compared with the linear combination of the basis
field vectors ~expressed with respect to the reference sys-
tem of the seed patch! weighted using the texture param-
eters of the seed patch. A single network iteration allows
the merging decision, based on the difference between the
orientation field of the patch and its approximation ~evalu-
ated with respect to the reference system and the texture
parameters of the seed patch!. During each patch-growing
process the weights of the second layer are kept fixed to the
values c i estimated by classifying the seed patch. The num-
ber of patches in the final region is used for judging the
correctness of texture parameters. In fact, wrong classifica-
tions do not expand. In those cases, the seed patch remains
unclassified, waiting for its subsequent inclusion into an-
other region. In the case of successful expansion, all the
patches in the region are marked as classified and excluded
from any further processing.
This extension policy increases the computational effi-
ciency of the process. Testing the validity of a parameter
vector in a neighboring patch requires a single iteration of
the neural net instead of the 300 to 400 iterations required
for solving Eq. ~4!.
Furthermore it accounts for the misclassification that a
local analysis of orientation fields could introduce keeping
~5!
the reference system used for the basis vector fields fixed
onto the seed patch during all the growing process.
4 Leather Inspection Process
The proposed approach is general and can be applied to
analyze any oriented texture by choosing appropriately the
~6! set of basis vectors $ c i (x,y) % , which spans the vector space
of the input patterns.
Generally the defects occurring on leather surfaces are
characterized by particular oriented structures representable
by orientation vector fields that can be optimally projected
onto the basis vectors ~Fig. 1! defined by the following
functions:
c 1 ~ x,y ! 5 SD
1
0
, ~7!
c 2 ~ x,y ! 5 SD
0
1
, ~8!
c 3 ~ x,y ! 5 S D
2x
2y
, ~9!
c 4 ~ x,y ! 5 S D
2y
x
, ~10!
S D
2x
c 5 ~ x,y ! 5 . ~11!
y
Essentially the whole inspection process can be divided
into two stages.
4.1 Off-Line Learning
Each different kind of leather requires @see Fig. 2~a!# the
determination of, first, the optimal values for the
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 Branca et al.: Automated system for detection and classification . . .

Fig. 1 Elementary texture vector fields.

1. Gaussian variance s the output $ C ji % evaluated by the neural network on these

2. Gaussian mask size a training images is used as estimate $ C̄ i % of BVC.
3. coherence neighborhood size b,

depending on leather characteristics such as brightness and

wrinkledness. Second, the background coefficient vector
~BCV! describing the leather without defects must be de-
termined.
After the experimental fixing of optimal values for sab,
several images I j (x,y) of leather without defects are sup-
plied to the system for estimating the BCV. The average of
4.2 On-Line Detection and Classification
The on-line check of a piece of leather @see Fig. 2~b!#
starts from the acquisition of an image I(x,y) ~of N pixels!,
which is then supplied to the system. The output C i (x,y)
of the network is an N-dimensional map that associates
the 5-D vector of estimated texture parameters

Fig. 2 Defect detection process: (a) for each kind of leather not defected, small patterns are pro-
cessed to determine the related BCV and (b) a generic pattern is processed and its map of vector of
coefficient is matched with the associated BCV to determine the map of defects.

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 Branca et al.: Automated system for detection and classification . . .

Fig. 3 Lash: (a) original image, (b) image of coherence, (c) orientation field, and (d) linear combination
of the basis vectors using the coefficients estimated by the neural network.

$ C i (x,y) % i51,...,M to each pixel (x,y) of the image. We call
this map the computed map. The difference between the
$ C̄ i % ~the BCV associated to the leather without defect! and
the $ C i (x,y) % ~computed coefficients! produces a new map
$ D i (x,y) % j51,...,M ~defect map! of 5-D coefficient vectors,
which are not null only for pixels in defective areas:
D i ~ x,y ! 5 i C i ~ x,y ! 2C̄ i i .
This filter process is able to isolate defect from the back-
ground.
5 Experimental Results
For our experiments, we analysed images ~5123512! ac-
quired from leather samples of about 10 to 15310 to 15 cm
using the same geometrical and lighting setup ~the camera
was held perpendicular to the leather sample and the light
source was at about 45 deg from the optical axis!. The
images were digitized using a COHU black and white cam-
era.
Several samples were considered with different kinds of
defects. Their names are related to the events, which often
occurred during the animal’s life, that have caused them.
Each defect produces a different oriented pattern that the
~12! proposed method is able to separate from the textural struc-
ture of the background.
The time required for preprocessing an image is about
1.5 s for the Gaussian convolution and about 10 s for the
orientation field estimation. They are actually accomplished
by software ~without optimization!. Being standard opera-
tions for which special boards can be used, they are not
expected to pose timing problems in engineering the final
system.
Figure 3 shows, for one of the samples, the original

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 Branca et al.: Automated system for detection and classification . . .

Fig. 4 Fold: (a) first original image, (b) linear combination of the basis vectors using the coefficients
estimated by the neural network for (a), (c) second original image, and (d) same as (b) but for (c).

gray-level image, the computed coherence image r (x,y),
the associated orientation field V(x,y), and finally the
linear combination of the basis vectors using the coeffi-
cients estimated by the neural network. The bright areas
in the coherence images correspond to regions that exhibit
oriented textures and therefore a stronger accordance
among gradient vectors. In the same figure, it is possible
to appreciate the expressiveness of the coefficients in de-
scribing the oriented structures characterizing the defective
areas.
Figures 4 through 12 show the results obtained on the
other samples, juxtaposing the original textured image and
the vector field obtained as a linear combination of the
choosen basis vectors using the coefficients estimated by
the proposed system. In all these cases, the basis vectors
provide an effective tool for describing the oriented textural
patterns associated to defective areas.
6 Conclusions and Future Work
The technique presented in this paper is able to analyze
oriented texture in an efficient way enabling defect detec-
tion and classification in all contexts where such oriented-
structures are present. It has proved to be effective also on
other materials17 ~wood, ferromagnetic materials, etc.!. It is
especially suited for the analysis of natural materials exhib-
iting complex and nonhomogeneous visual appearances.
It seems promising for on-line automated inspection
since the most computationally expensive task ~finding the
optimal values for the sab parameters and determining the
BCV! is made once as an off-line training phase. Therefore
the best setup for each particular kind of leather can be
recalled every time such kinds of material need to be em-
ployed in the manufacturing process. Nevertheless further

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 Branca et al.: Automated system for detection and classification . . .

Fig. 5 Fold: (a) first original image, (b) linear combination of the basis vectors using the coefficients
estimated by the neural network for (a), (c) second original image, and (d) same as (b) but for (c).

Fig. 6 Cut: (a) original image and (b) linear combination of the basis Fig. 7 Scar: (a) original image and (b) linear combination of the
vectors using the coefficients estimated by the neural network. basis vectors using the coefficients estimated by the neural network.

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 Branca et al.: Automated system for detection and classification . . .

Fig. 8 Gored: (a) first original image, (b) linear combination of the basis vectors using the coefficients
estimated by the neural network for (a), (c) second original image, and (d) same as (b) but for (c).

Fig. 9 Wart: (a) original images and (b) linear combination of the basis vectors using the coefficients
estimated by the neural network.

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 Branca et al.: Automated system for detection and classification . . .

Fig. 10 Eczema: (a) original image and (b) linear combination of the basis vectors using the coeffi-
cients estimated by the neural network.

Fig. 11 Stretch mark: (a) original image and (b) linear combination of the basis vectors usin the
coefficients estimated by the neural network.

Fig. 12 Not uniform color: (a) original image and (b) linear combination of the basis vectors using the
coefficients estimated by the neural network.

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 Branca et al.: Automated system for detection and classification . . .
investigations are in progress to fix all the parameters in an
automatic or semiautomatic way.
Current research is devoted also to the optimization of
the time required by the on-line process for dealing with the
large pieces of leather ~up to 5 m2! often involved in manu-
facturing processes. This activity will involve:
1. line-scan for pipelining the inspection process with
respect to the acquisition step
2. multiresolution analysis for finding at coarser resolu-
tions the defective areas needing further analysis at
higher resolution
3. parallel processing for taking advantage of the intrin-
sic data parallelism due to the local nature of the
approach.
Acknowledgments
This work was partially supported by a grant from the Na-
tional Council of Research project on Innovative Automatic
Systems for Industrial Inspection.
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Antonella Branca received a degree in
computer science from the University of
Bari in 1992 and was a research associate
at the Institute for Signal and Image Pro-
cessing until 1995, working on computer
vision applications. She is currently with
Corinto (IBM).
Maria Tafuri received a degree in com-
puter science from the University of Bari in
1994 and has since been a research as-
sociate at the Institute for Signal and Im-
age Processing under a grant from the
Italian National Research Council. Her in-
terests include computer vision, artificial
neural networks, and robotics.
Giovanni Attolico received a degree in
computer science from the University of
Bari in 1986. From 1986 to 1992 he was a
research associate at the Institute for Sig-
nal and Image Processing on applications
of computer vision to robotics. He was with
Olivetti Ricerca for 2 years working on im-
age acquisition, archiving, and processing
applied to medicine. He is currently a re-
searcher at the Institute for Signal and Im-
age Processing working on image analysis
and machine learning.
Arcangelo Distante received degrees in
computer science at the University of Bari,
Italy, in 1976. Until 1981 he was with INFN
(National Nuclear Physics Institute) and
was subsequently with IESI (Image and
Signal Processing Institute) of the CNR
(National Research Council). Currently he
is the coordinator of the Robot Vision
Group at IESI-CNR and directs the IESI
Institute. His research interests are 3-D
object reconstruction, representation of vi-
sual information and generation of 3-D modeling, shape represen-
tation for image understanding, vision for robotic navigation, and
architectures for computer vision. Dr. Distante is a member of the
IAPR.