Grain Segmentation in Atomic Force Microscopy for Thin-Film Deposition Quality Control

In this paper we propose an image segmentation method specifically designed to detect crystalline grains in microscopic images. We build on the watershed segmentation approach; we propose a preprocessing pipeline to generate a topographic map exploiting the physical nature of the incoming data (i.e. Atomic Force Microscopy) to emphasize grain boundaries and generate seeds for basins. Experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed method against grain segmentation implementations available in commercial software on a new labelled dataset with an average improvement of over 20% in precision and recall over the standard implementation of watershed segmentation.