A facile methodology to identify microstructural grains on etched surfaces using panoptic segmentation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The advancement of manufacturing processes demands the deployment of new innovative solutions to control polycrystalline material microstructures in cheap, safe and rapid manner. Analysing polycrystalline microstructures requires grain segmentation, which is typically performed on image data or spatially resolved diffraction data collected from carefully prepared specimens. Recently, machine learning (ML) models have been developed to identify grain boundaries and defects from acquired image data. Despite existing ML-based methods showing an improvement over classical computational methods, there is still a significant structure error due to the necessity to have a high accuracy in detected boundaries to avoid grain misidentification. This investigation deploys a simple and open panoptic model, YOLO (You only look once), to directly identify grains from etched surfaces. The model performance was evaluated after appropriate data preparation and training. Even with a limited number of samples, the model outperformed computational methods like the Canny edge algorithm with an intersection-over-union ( IoU ) score 45 % higher and an aggregated Jaccard index score three times higher. Additionally, an index to measure segmentation quality was introduced, particularly suited for objects with a wide range of sizes, such as microstructural grains. By detecting grains directly instead of relying on boundary detection, common issues—such as failed grains reconstruction due to missing grain boundaries—are avoided, resulting in more accurate grain structures with reduced sensitivity to surface defects. The proposed approach offers significant potential for application to various materials and grain sizes, facilitating the detection of grains, defects, and microstructural artefacts.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".