  Deep learning has driven a great progress in natural and biological image
processing. However, in material science and engineering, there are often some
flaws and indistinctions in material microscopic images induced from complex
sample preparation, even due to the material itself, hindering the detection of
target objects. In this work, we propose WPU-net that redesigns the
architecture and weighted loss of U-Net, which forces the network to integrate
information from adjacent slices and pays more attention to the topology in
boundary detection task. Then, the WPU-net is applied into a typical material
example, i.e., the grain boundary detection of polycrystalline material.
Experiments demonstrate that the proposed method achieves promising performance
and outperforms state-of-the-art methods. Besides, we propose a new method for
object tracking between adjacent slices, which can effectively reconstruct 3D
structure of the whole material. Finally, we present a material microscopic
image dataset with the goal of advancing the state-of-the-art in image
processing for material science.
