SAGE-GAN: Towards Realistic and Robust Segmentation of Spatially Ordered Nanoparticles via Attention-Guided GANs

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Pal, Anindya, Ajith, Varun, Bhattacharya, Saumik, Ghosh, Sayantari
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
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author Pal, Anindya
Ajith, Varun
Bhattacharya, Saumik
Ghosh, Sayantari
author_facet Pal, Anindya
Ajith, Varun
Bhattacharya, Saumik
Ghosh, Sayantari
contents Precise analysis of nanoparticles for characterization in electron microscopy images is essential for advancing nanomaterial development. Yet it remains challenging due to the time-consuming nature of manual methods and the shortcomings of traditional automated segmentation techniques, especially when dealing with complex shapes and imaging artifacts. While conventional methods yield promising results, they depend on a large volume of labeled training data, which is both difficult to acquire and highly time-consuming to generate. In order to overcome these challenges, we have developed a two-step solution: Firstly, our system learns to segment the key features of nanoparticles from a dataset of real images using a self-attention driven U-Net architecture that focuses on important physical and morphological details while ignoring background features and noise. Secondly, this trained Attention U-Net is embedded in a cycle-consistent generative adversarial network (CycleGAN) framework, inspired by the cGAN-Seg model introduced by Abzargar et al. This integration allows for the creation of highly realistic synthetic electron microscopy image-mask pairs that naturally reflect the structural patterns learned by the Attention U-Net. Consequently, the model can accurately detect features in a diverse array of real-world nanoparticle images and autonomously augment the training dataset without requiring human input. Cycle consistency enforces a direct correspondence between synthetic images and ground-truth masks, ensuring realistic features, which is crucial for accurate segmentation training.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_03637
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle SAGE-GAN: Towards Realistic and Robust Segmentation of Spatially Ordered Nanoparticles via Attention-Guided GANs
Pal, Anindya
Ajith, Varun
Bhattacharya, Saumik
Ghosh, Sayantari
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Precise analysis of nanoparticles for characterization in electron microscopy images is essential for advancing nanomaterial development. Yet it remains challenging due to the time-consuming nature of manual methods and the shortcomings of traditional automated segmentation techniques, especially when dealing with complex shapes and imaging artifacts. While conventional methods yield promising results, they depend on a large volume of labeled training data, which is both difficult to acquire and highly time-consuming to generate. In order to overcome these challenges, we have developed a two-step solution: Firstly, our system learns to segment the key features of nanoparticles from a dataset of real images using a self-attention driven U-Net architecture that focuses on important physical and morphological details while ignoring background features and noise. Secondly, this trained Attention U-Net is embedded in a cycle-consistent generative adversarial network (CycleGAN) framework, inspired by the cGAN-Seg model introduced by Abzargar et al. This integration allows for the creation of highly realistic synthetic electron microscopy image-mask pairs that naturally reflect the structural patterns learned by the Attention U-Net. Consequently, the model can accurately detect features in a diverse array of real-world nanoparticle images and autonomously augment the training dataset without requiring human input. Cycle consistency enforces a direct correspondence between synthetic images and ground-truth masks, ensuring realistic features, which is crucial for accurate segmentation training.
title SAGE-GAN: Towards Realistic and Robust Segmentation of Spatially Ordered Nanoparticles via Attention-Guided GANs
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.03637