Image-Signal Correlation Network for Textile Fiber Identification

Identifying fiber compositions is an important aspect of the textile industry. In recent decades, near-infrared spectroscopy has shown its potential in the automatic detection of fiber components. However, for plant fibers such as cotton and linen, the chemical compositions are the same and thus the absorption spectra are very similar, leading to the problem of "different materials with the same spectrum, whereas the same material with different spectrums" and it is difficult using a single mode of NIR signals to capture the effective features to distinguish these fibers. To solve this problem, textile experts under a microscope measure the cross-sectional or longitudinal characteristics of fibers to determine fiber contents with a destructive way. In this paper, we construct the first NIR signal-microscope image textile fiber composition dataset (NIRITFC). Based on the NIRITFC dataset, we propose an image-signal correlation network (ISiC-Net) and design image-signal correlation perception and image-signal correlation attention modules, respectively, to effectively integrate the visual features (esp. local texture details of fibers) with the finer absorption spectrum information of the NIR signal to capture the deep abstract features of bimodal data for nondestructive textile fiber identification. To better learn the spectral characteristics of the fiber components, the endmember vectors of the corresponding fibers are generated by embedding encoding, and the reconstruction loss is designed to guide the model to reconstruct the NIR signals of the corresponding fiber components by a nonlinear mapping. The quantitative and qualitative results are significantly improved compared to both single and bimodal approaches, indicating the great potential of combining microscopic images and NIR signals for textile fiber composition identification.