Estimating the phase volume fraction of multi-phase steel via unsupervised deep learning

Advanced high strength steel (AHSS) is a steel of multi-phase microstructure that is processed under several conditions to meet the current high-performance requirements from the industry. Deep neural network (DNN) has emerged as a promising tool in materials science for the task of estimating the phase volume fraction of these steels. Despite its advantages, one of its major drawbacks is its requirement of a sufficient amount of training data with correct labels to the network. This often comes as a challenge in many areas where obtaining data and labeling it is extremely labor-intensive. To overcome this challenge, an unsupervised way of learning DNN, which does not require any manual labeling, is proposed. Information maximizing generative adversarial network (InfoGAN) is used to learn the underlying probability distribution of each phase and generate realistic sample points with class labels. Then, the generated data is used for training an MLP classifier, which in turn predicts the labels for the original dataset. The result shows a mean relative error of 4.53% at most, while it can be as low as 0.73%, which implies the estimated phase fraction closely matches the true phase fraction. This presents the high feasibility of using the proposed methodology for fast and precise estimation of phase volume fraction in both industry and academia.