TD U-Net for Shell Segmentation and Thickness Evaluation in Core–Shell TiO2 TEM Images

Titanium dioxide (TiO₂) is widely used in coatings, plastics, rubber, papermaking, and other industries. The microstructural characteristics of its inorganic shell largely determine the overall performance of the product, significantly affecting optical behavior, dispersibility, weather resistance, and stability. Currently, coating quality evaluation in industry still relies primarily on manual inspection, lacking objective, standardized, and reproducible quantitative methods. This study focuses on lab-prepared core-shell TiO₂ powders comprising a TiO₂ core and a thin inorganic shell enriched in alumina/silica. This study presents Titanium Dioxide U-Net (TD U-Net)-a deep learning approach for transmission electron microscopy (TEM) image segmentation and shell thickness evaluation of core-shell structured TiO₂ particles. TD U-Net employs an encoder-decoder architecture that effectively integrates multi-scale features, addressing challenges such as blurred boundaries and low contrast. We constructed a dataset of 1479 TEM images processed through a six-step workflow: image collection, data cleaning, annotation, mask generation, augmentation, and cropping. Results show that TD U-Net achieves a Dice coefficient of 0.967 for segmentation accuracy and controls shell-thickness measurement error within 5%, significantly outperforming existing image-processing models. An intelligent analysis system developed from this technology has been successfully applied to titanium dioxide product quality assessment, providing an efficient and reliable automated tool for coating-process optimization and quality control.