An End-to-End Computer Vision Methodology for Quantitative Metallography

TL;DR

This paper introduces an AI-driven end-to-end methodology for metallography analysis, automating the detection and quantification of impurities and anomalies in alloy microstructures to assist material assessment.

Contribution

It presents a comprehensive AI pipeline combining semantic segmentation, inpainting, and anomaly detection for metallography, with publicly available datasets and models.

Findings

Effective anomaly detection in alloy microstructures

Automated identification of inclusions and grain boundaries

Potential generalization to other geometrical anomaly detection tasks

Abstract

Metallography is crucial for a proper assessment of material's properties. It involves mainly the investigation of spatial distribution of grains and the occurrence and characteristics of inclusions or precipitates. This work presents an holistic artificial intelligence model for Anomaly Detection that automatically quantifies the degree of anomaly of impurities in alloys. We suggest the following examination process: (1) Deep semantic segmentation is performed on the inclusions (based on a suitable metallographic database of alloys and corresponding tags of inclusions), producing inclusions masks that are saved into a separated database. (2) Deep image inpainting is performed to fill the removed inclusions parts, resulting in 'clean' metallographic images, which contain the background of grains. (3) Grains' boundaries are marked using deep semantic segmentation (based on another metallographic database of alloys), producing boundaries that are ready for further inspection on the distribution of grains' size. (4) Deep anomaly detection and pattern recognition is performed on the inclusions masks to determine spatial, shape and area anomaly detection of the inclusions. Finally, the system recommends to an expert on areas of interests for further examination. The performance of the model is presented and analyzed based on few representative cases. Although the models presented here were developed for metallography analysis, most of them can be generalized to a wider set of problems in which anomaly detection of geometrical objects is desired. All models as well as the data-sets that were created for this work, are publicly available at https://github.com/Scientific-Computing-Lab-NRCN/MLography.