Measuring Porosity in Ceramic Coating using Convolutional Neural Networks and Semantic Segmentation

Abstract: Ceramic materials contain several defects, one of which is porosity. At the time of writing, porosity measurement is a manual and time-consuming process performed by a human operator. With advances in deep learning for computer vision, this thesis explores to what degree convolutional neural networks and semantic segmentation can reliably measure porosity from microscope images. Combining classical image processing techniques with deep learning, images were automatically labeled and then used for training semantic segmentation neural networks leveraging transfer learning. Deep learning-based methods were more robust and could more reliably identify porosity in a larger variety of images than solely relying on classical image processing techniques.