Electron microscopy images of carbon nanotube (CNT) forests are difficult to segment due to the long and thin nature of the CNTs; density of the CNT forests resulting in CNTs touching, crossing, and occluding each other; and low signal-to-noise ratio electron microscopy imagery. In addition, due to image complexity, it is not feasible to prepare training segmentation masks. In this paper, we propose CNTSegNet, a dual loss, orientation-guided, self-supervised, deep learning network for CNT forest segmentation in scanning electron microscopy (SEM) images. Our training labels consist of weak segmentation labels produced by intensity thresholding of the raw SEM images and self labels produced by estimating orientation distribution of CNTs in these raw images. The proposed network extends a U-net-like encoder-decoder architecture with a novel two-component loss function. The first component is dice loss computed between the predicted segmentation maps and the weak segmentation labels. The second component is mean squared error (MSE) loss measuring the difference between the orientation histogram of the predicted segmentation map and the original raw image. Weighted sum of these two loss functions is used to train the proposed CNTSegNet network. The dice loss forces the network to perform background-foreground segmentation using local intensity features. The MSE loss guides the network with global orientation features and leads to refined segmentation results. The proposed system needs only a few-shot dataset for training. Thanks to it’s self-supervised nature, it can easily be adapted to new datasets.
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This content will become publicly available on January 1, 2024
CNT-NeRF: Carbon Nanotube Forest Depth Layer Decomposition in SEM Imagery Using Generative Adversarial Networks
Carbon nanotube (CNT) forests are imaged using scanning
electron microscopes (SEMs) that project their multilayered
3D structure into a single 2D image. Image analytics,
particularly instance segmentation is needed to quantify
structural characteristics and to predict correlations between
structural morphology and physical properties. The
inherent complexity of individual CNT structures is further
increased in CNT forests due to density of CNTs, interactions
between CNTs, occlusions, and lack of 3D information
to resolve correspondences when multiple CNTs from
different depths appear to cross in 2D. In this paper, we propose
CNT-NeRF, a generative adversarial network (GAN)
for simultaneous depth layer decomposition and segmentation
of CNT forests in SEM images. The proposed network is
trained using a multi-layer, photo-realistic synthetic dataset
obtained by transferring the style of real CNT images to
physics-based simulation data. Experiments show promising
depth layer decomposition and accurate CNT segmentation
results not only for the front layer but also for the
partially occluded middle and back layers. This achievement
is a significant step towards automated, image-based
CNT forest structure characterization and physical property
prediction.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2026847
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10451139
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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