A real-time vision based automatic lace trimming process

During the last few years automating lace handling has received much attention in the United Kingdom. Research and development is ongoing in the two main areas of automatic lace cutting and automatic lace quality inspection. This paper reports on research and development work under gone at the Nottingham Trent University, in collaboration with local industry, in automation of lace scalloping. The research is reviewed in its various stages of development. Three different methods together with their associated experimental results are described and the merits of each are discussed. An innovative approach, based on neural fuzzy logic, for dealing with the problem of lace distortion, due to its flexible nature, is described.