TY - JOUR A1 - Tsamos, Athanasios A1 - Evsevleev, Sergei A1 - Fioresi, R. A1 - Faglioni, F. A1 - Bruno, Giovanni T1 - Synthetic Data Generation for Automatic Segmentation of X-ray Computed Tomography Reconstructions of Complex Microstructures JF - Journal of Imaging N2 - The greatest challenge when using deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs) for automatic segmentation of microstructural X-ray computed tomography (XCT) data is the acquisition of sufficient and relevant data to train the working network. Traditionally, these have been attained by manually annotating a few slices for 2D DCNNs. However, complex multiphase microstructures would presumably be better segmented with 3D networks. However, manual segmentation labeling for 3D problems is prohibitive. In this work, we introduce a method for generating synthetic XCT data for a challenging six-phase Al–Si alloy composite reinforced with ceramic fibers and particles. Moreover, we propose certain data augmentations (brightness, contrast, noise, and blur), a special in-house designed deep convolutional neural network (Triple UNet), and a multi-view forwarding strategy to promote generalized learning from synthetic data and therefore achieve successful segmentations. We obtain an overall Dice score of 0.77. Lastly, we prove the detrimental effects of artifacts in the XCT data on achieving accurate segmentations when synthetic data are employed for training the DCNNs. The methods presented in this work are applicable to other materials and imaging techniques as well. Successful segmentation coupled with neural networks trained with synthetic data will accelerate scientific output. KW - Automatic segmentation KW - 3D deep convolutional neural network (3D DCNN) KW - Dice score KW - Metal matrix composite (MMC) KW - Modified U-Net architectures KW - Multi-phase materials PY - 2023 UR - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:kobv:b43-571243 DO - https://doi.org/10.3390/jimaging9020022 VL - 9 IS - 2 SP - 1 EP - 23 PB - MDPI AN - OPUS4-57124 LA - eng AD - Bundesanstalt fuer Materialforschung und -pruefung (BAM), Berlin, Germany ER -