Instant Particle Size Distribution Measurement Using CNNs Trained on Synthetic Data

TL;DR

This paper introduces a CNN-based method trained on synthetic images for real-time particle size distribution measurement, improving automation and efficiency in industrial quality control processes.

Contribution

We demonstrate that realistic synthetic data can effectively train CNNs for accurate PSD estimation, enabling automated, real-time industrial applications.

Findings

EfficientNet-B0 achieved the best balance of accuracy and computational efficiency.

Synthetic data closely mimics real industrial particle images.

CNN architectures performed comparably in PSD prediction accuracy.

Abstract

Accurate particle size distribution (PSD) measurement is important in industries such as mining, pharmaceuticals, and fertilizer manufacturing, significantly influencing product quality and operational efficiency. Traditional PSD methods like sieve analysis and laser diffraction are manual, time-consuming, and limited by particle overlap. Recent developments in convolutional neural networks (CNNs) enable automated, real-time PSD estimation directly from particle images. In this work, we present a CNN-based methodology trained on realistic synthetic particle imagery generated using Blender's advanced rendering capabilities. Synthetic data sets using this method can replicate various industrial scenarios by systematically varying particle shapes, textures, lighting, and spatial arrangements that closely resemble the actual configurations. We evaluated three CNN-based architectures, ResNet-50, InceptionV3, and EfficientNet-B0, for predicting critical PSD parameters (d10, d50, d90). Results demonstrated comparable accuracy across models, with EfficientNet-B0 achieving the best computational efficiency suitable for real-time industrial deployment. This approach shows the effectiveness of realistic synthetic data for robust CNN training, which offers significant potential for automated industrial PSD monitoring. The code is released at : https://github.com/YasserElj/Synthetic-Granular-Gen