Automated material characterization system including conditional generative adversarial networks

1. A material characterization system comprising:

an electronic imaging unit configured to generate at least one test input image of a specimen composed of a material;

an electronic material characterization controller configured to determine values of a plurality of functional parameters that specify a functional mapping, to map the at least one test input image of the specimen to at least one output image based on the functional mapping specified by the determined parameters, to predict a presence of at least one target attribute of the specimen in response to applying the functional mapping and analyzing the at least one output image, and to convert the at least one output image to a selected output image format so as to generate a synthetic image including the predicted at least one attribute; and

an electronic imaging unit controller configured to perform a material characterization analysis that characterizes the material of the specimen based on the predicted at least one attribute included in the synthetic image;

wherein

the synthetic image is a fused synthetic image including a plurality of predicted attributes that are different from one another;

the material characterization controller includes a plurality of conditional generative adversarial networks (CGANs) and, each CGAN and among the plurality of CGANs configured to predict the presence of a respective attribute;

the plurality of CGANs includes:

a first CGAN confirmed to predict a presence of at least one grain element in the specimen, and to generate a first synthetic image including the predicted at least one grain element; and

a second CGAN configured to predict an edge location of the least one grain element, and to generate a second synthetic image including the predicted edge location of the at least one grain element

the imaging unit controller includes an electronic image fusing unit that superimposes the second synthetic image with the first synthetic image to generate the fused synthetic image;

the superimposition of predicted edge locations with predicted grain elements identifies at least one individually segmented grain;

the imaging unit controller is configured to perform at least one post-processing operation on the fused synthetic image; and

the material characterization analysis includes characterizing at least one of a strength of the material, a fatigue rate of the material, and fracture growth rate.

2. The material characterization system of claim 1 , wherein at least one post-processing operation on the fused synthetic image includes at least one of a watershed analysis, a post-segmentation operation, a synthetic image correcting operation, and a grain filtering operation.

3. The material characterization system of claim 1 , wherein the imaging unit controller generates characterized image data based on the fused synthetic image and the material characterization analysis.

4. The material characterization system of claim 3 , further comprising a display unit that displays a characterized image based on the characterized image data.

5. The material characterization system of claim 4 , wherein the characterized image includes at least one graphical indicator that indicates at least one of the strength of the material, the fatigue rate of the material, and fracture growth rate.

6. The material characterization system of claim 1 , wherein the material characterization controller executes a training process prior to generating the test image.

7. The material characterization system of claim 6 , wherein the material characterization controller learns the modeled parameters in response to identifying known attributes of a previously analyzed specimen based on a comparison between the real image and the known ground truth image.

8. The material characterization system of claim 7 , wherein the learned ground truth images include the known ground truth attributes.