Segmentation of rays in wood microscopy images using the U-net model

Rays are an important anatomical feature in tree species identification. They are found in certain proportions in trees, which vary for each tree. In this study, the U-Net model is adopted for the first time to detect wood rays. A dataset is created with images taken from the wood database. The resolution of microscopic wood images in tangential section is 640×400. The input image for training is divided into 32×32 image blocks. Each pixel in the dataset is labeled as belonging to the ray or the background. Then, the dataset is increased by applying scale, rotation, salt-and-pepper noise, circular mean filter, and gauss filter. The U-Net network created for ray segmentation is trained using the Adam optimization algorithm. The experimental results show that the ray segmentation accuracy in testing is 96.3%.