Segmentation of Microscopic Image of Colorants Using U-Net Based Deep Convolutional Networks for Material Appearance Design

In this study, U-Net based deep convolutional networks are used to achieve the segmentation of particle regions in a microscopic image of colorants. The material appearance of products is greatly affected by the distribution of the particle size. From that fact, it is important to obtain the distribution of the particle size to design the material appearance of products. To obtain the particle size distribution, it is necessary to segment particle regions in the microscopic image of colorants. Conventionally, this segmentation is performed manually using simple image processing. However, this manual processing leads to low reproducibility. Therefore, in this paper, to extract the particle region with high reproducibility, segmentation is performed using U-Net based deep convolutional networks. We improved deep convolutional U-Net type networks based on the feature maps trained for a microscopic image of colorants. As a result, we obtained more accurate segmentation results using the improved network than conventional U-Net.