Image analysis of the cross section of cotton fibers constitutes an excellent reference method for maturity and fineness measurements. Nevertheless, this technique is too slow to be of practical use in commercial operations or plant breeding programs. The AFIS data could provide the industry with a very powerful tool if it relates well with the image analysis data.

The results obtained show that the AFIS is giving very good correlation with the image analysis, especially for the perimeter. They also show that a re-evaluation of the AFIS algorithm is necessary to obtain the same levels than image analysis. This task should be very straightforward and quite simple to achieve. Furthermore, the perimeters estimated with the AFIS and the perimeters measured with image analysis are giving very good correlations with yarn strength.