Computer Vision Methods for the Microstructural Analysis of Materials: The State-of-the-art and Future Perspectives

TL;DR

This paper reviews recent CNN-based computer vision techniques for microstructural analysis in materials science, highlighting current methods, challenges, and future prospects including transformer models for improved analysis.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of state-of-the-art CNN methods applied to microstructural image analysis and discusses future directions with transformer-based models.

Findings

CNN methods have shown promising results in microstructural analysis

Challenges include data scarcity and model generalization

Future research may leverage transformer models for better performance

Abstract

Finding quantitative descriptors representing the microstructural features of a given material is an ongoing research area in the paradigm of Materials-by-Design. Historically, microstructural analysis mostly relies on qualitative descriptions. However, to build a robust and accurate process-structure-properties relationship, which is required for designing new advanced high-performance materials, the extraction of quantitative and meaningful statistical data from the microstructural analysis is a critical step. In recent years, computer vision (CV) methods, especially those which are centered around convolutional neural network (CNN) algorithms have shown promising results for this purpose. This review paper focuses on the state-of-the-art CNN-based techniques that have been applied to various multi-scale microstructural image analysis tasks, including classification, object detection, segmentation, feature extraction, and reconstruction. Additionally, we identified the main challenges with regard to the application of these methods to materials science research. Finally, we discussed some possible future directions of research in this area. In particular, we emphasized the application of transformer-based models and their capabilities to improve the microstructural analysis of materials.