Optimized Image Segmentation Model for Pellet Microstructure Incorporating KL Divergence Constraints

Accurate segmentation of pellet microstructure images is crucial for evaluating their metallurgical performance and optimizing production processes. To address the challenges posed by complex structures, blurred boundaries, and fine-grained textures of hematite and magnetite in pellet micrographs, this study proposes a hybrid intelligently optimized VGG16-U-Net semantic segmentation model. The model incorporates an improved SPC-SA channel self-attention mechanism in the encoder to enhance deep feature representation, while a simplified SAN and SAW module is integrated into the decoder to strengthen its response to key mineral regions. Additionally, a hybrid loss strategy is employed with KL regularization for training optimization. Experimental results show that the model achieves an mIoU of 85.58%, an mPA of 91.54%, and an overall accuracy of 93.58%. Compared with the baseline models, the proposed method achieves improved performance to some extent.