Denoising diffusion-based synthetic generation of three-dimensional (3D) anisotropic microstructures from two-dimensional (2D) micrographs
This work addresses a domain-specific challenge in materials engineering by enabling high-throughput material design through improved microstructure-property linkages, though it is incremental as it builds on existing diffusion models.
The paper tackles the scarcity of 3D anisotropic microstructure datasets by proposing a framework that reconstructs 3D anisotropic microstructures from 2D micrographs using conditional diffusion-based generative models, demonstrating its ability to reproduce statistical distributions and material properties in 3D space.
Integrated computational materials engineering (ICME) has significantly enhanced the systemic analysis of the relationship between microstructure and material properties, paving the way for the development of high-performance materials. However, analyzing microstructure-sensitive material behavior remains challenging due to the scarcity of three-dimensional (3D) microstructure datasets. Moreover, this challenge is amplified if the microstructure is anisotropic, as this results in anisotropic material properties as well. In this paper, we present a framework for reconstruction of anisotropic microstructures solely based on two-dimensional (2D) micrographs using conditional diffusion-based generative models (DGMs). The proposed framework involves spatial connection of multiple 2D conditional DGMs, each trained to generate 2D microstructure samples for three different orthogonal planes. The connected multiple reverse diffusion processes then enable effective modeling of a Markov chain for transforming noise into a 3D microstructure sample. Furthermore, a modified harmonized sampling is employed to enhance the sample quality while preserving the spatial connection between the slices of anisotropic microstructure samples in 3D space. To validate the proposed framework, the 2D-to-3D reconstructed anisotropic microstructure samples are evaluated in terms of both the spatial correlation function and the physical material behavior. The results demonstrate that the framework is capable of reproducing not only the statistical distribution of material phases but also the material properties in 3D space. This highlights the potential application of the proposed 2D-to-3D reconstruction framework in establishing microstructure-property linkages, which could aid high-throughput material design for future studies