DeepSC-Edge: Scientific Corrosion Segmentation with Edge-Guided and Class-Balanced Losses

Corrosion is a prevalent issue in numerous industrial fields, causing expenses nearing $3 trillion or 4% of the GDP annually with safety threats and environmental pollution. To timely qualify and validate new corrosion-inhibiting materials on a large scale, accurate and efficient corrosion assessment is crucial. Yet it is hindered by a lack of automatic tools for expert-level corrosion segmentation of material science experimental images. Developing such tools is challenging due to limited domain-valid data, image artifacts visually similar to corrosion, various corrosion morphology, strong class imbalance, and millimeter-precision corrosion boundaries. To help the community address these challenges, we curate the first expert-level segmentation annotations for a real-world image dataset [1] for scientific corrosion segmentation. In addition, we design a deep learning based model, called DeepSC-Edge that achieves guidance of ground-truth edge learning by adopting a novel loss that avoids over-fitting to edges. It also is enriched by integrating a class-balanced loss that improves segmentation with small area but crucial edges of interest for scientific corrosion assessment. Our dataset and methods pave the way to advanced deep-learning models for corrosion assessment and generation – promoting new research to connect computer vision and material science discovery. Once the appropriate approvals have been cleared, we expect to release the code and data at: https://arl.wpi.edu/