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Corrosion is a prevalent issue in numerous industrial fields, causing expenses nearing $3 trillion or 4% of the GDP annually with safety threats and environmental pollution. To timely qualify and validate new corrosion-inhibiting materials on a large scale, accurate and efficient corrosion assessment is crucial. Yet it is hindered by a lack of automatic tools for expert-level corrosion segmentation of material science experimental images. Developing such tools is challenging due to limited domain-valid data, image artifacts visually similar to corrosion, various corrosion morphology, strong class imbalance, and millimeter-precision corrosion boundaries. To help the community address these challenges, we curate the first expert-level segmentation annotations for a real-world image dataset [1] for scientific corrosion segmentation. In addition, we design a deep learning-based model, called DeepSC-Edge that achieves guidance of ground-truth edge learning by adopting a novel loss that avoids over-fitting to edges. It also is enriched by integrating a class-balanced loss that improves segmentation with small area but crucial edges of interest for scientific corrosion assessment. Our dataset and methods pave the way to advanced deep-learning models for corrosion assessment and generation – promoting new research to connect computer vision and material science discovery. Once the appropriate approvals have been cleared, we expect to release the code and data at: https://arl.wpi.edu/ 

Corrosion of materials impacts critical economic sectors from infrastructure, transportation, defense, health, to the environment. The development of safe anti-corrosive materials is thus an important area of study in materials science. Corrosion science of preparing materials and then monitoring their corrosion under adverse conditions is labor intensive, time consuming, and extremely costly. While deep learning has become popular in automating various engineering tasks, the development of deep models for corrosion assessment is lacking. We are the first to study deep domain adaptation (DA) models for the automated assessment of the corrosion status of anti-corrosive materials. Corrosion data, i.e., photographic images of treated corroding materials, is abundant when produced in artificially controlled laboratory settings, while corrosion image data sets from rich natural outdoor environments are more challenging to produce and thus much smaller. We leverage the more readily available indoor corrosion data to train a classifier and then transfer it via deep domain adaptation to also perform well on the small yet more realistic outdoor corrosion image data set – without requiring target labels. We empirically compare 5 popular domain adaptation models on real-world corrosion image data sets. Our study finds that DA achieves 27% improvement in test accuracy compared to the performance of the no-DA baseline for classifying real-world outdoor corrosion data.