Automatic ply-specific analyses of CFRP micrographs using shortest-path-based ply distinction

Short-fiber thermoplastic (SFT) composites are increasingly employed in lightweight aerospace and automotive structures owing to their favorable strength-to-weight ratio, high production rates, and recyclability. Unlike continuous-fiber systems, the mechanical response of SFTs is governed by mesoscale interactions among fiber orientation, spatial clustering, and manufacturing-induced porosity. These features exhibit significant spatial variability in manufactured components and influence stiffness, damage initiation, and nonlinear deformation. Although mesoscale finite element (FE) models can resolve such heterogeneity, their application to realistic three-dimensional microstructures remains computationally intractable. A data-driven surrogate framework is proposed to predict the mechanical behavior of additively manufactured, compression-molded (AM-CM) SFTs. Microstructures reconstructed from micro-computed tomography data were discretized into Voronoi-based cells representing distinct fiber-interaction neighborhoods. Each cell was homogenized via nonlinear FE simulations incorporating matrix damage, and the resulting stress-strain responses trained a hybrid Graph Neural Network-Long Short-Term Memory (GNN-LSTM) architecture encoding microstructural topology and history-dependent mechanical evolution. The surrogate accurately predicts stiffness and stress-strain behavior of unseen microstructures, achieving $R^2\approx 0.98$ relative to high-fidelity FE simulations with over two orders-of-magnitude reduction in computational cost. Coupling the framework with experimentally calibrated damage laws demonstrates that fiber orientation, clustering, and porosity collectively govern local effective stiffness. The approach provides a physics-informed, data-efficient pathway to identify mechanically weak microstructural cells and accelerate digital-twin development for SFT components.

Thin-structure segmentation--power lines, cracks, lane markings at 1-3 pixel width--requires preserving connectivity that standard representations preclude: patching severs continuous structures and conventional superpixels merge thin targets into background before classification. Topology-aware losses penalize connectivity breaks at the objective level but cannot recover what the representation has already destroyed. We propose SEMIR, a framework that replaces the pixel lattice with a parameterized graph minor whose contraction map preserves thin-structure connectivity under the contraction criterion. The minor collapses millions of pixels into tens or hundreds of boundary-aligned supernodes, enabling full-resolution inference without patching at scales demonstrated up to 21 MP in this paper; a lightweight GNN classifies the reduced graph and an exact map lifts predictions to pixel resolution. One pipeline--identical architecture, features, loss, and GNN hyperparameters across all dataset--matches or exceeds domain-specific baselines on TTPLA (power lines), CrackSeg9k (pavement cracks), and SkyScapes Lane (aerial markings) on Dice, IoU, and Boundary F1 while reducing mask fragmentation by at least 4.6x relative to SLIC at matched inference.

Automated pavement distress assessment requires more than image-level classification or coarse bounding box detection, demanding precise localization of thin, branching, and irregular cracks to achieve the geometric precision necessary for maintenance-relevant quantification. This paper presents a vision-based pavement distress analysis system based on Mask R-CNN instance segmentation and evaluates it on UWGB-StreetCrack, a custom field-collected roadway image dataset acquired with a vehicle-mounted smartphone and manually annotated with polygon labels for longitudinal cracks, transverse cracks, alligator cracks, and potholes. Five Detectron2-based Mask R-CNN backbone variants were considered under a consistent fine-tuning protocol. The best-performing model, Mask R-CNN with a ResNet-101 FPN backbone, achieved 84.23% precision, 90.04% recall, and an F1 score of 87.04% under the project-specific bounding-box matching protocol. The same model produced an aggregate predicted crack-area fraction of 2.164%, closely matching the 2.170% ground-truth crack-area fraction. To contextualize the segmentation system against a detector-oriented alternative, a CSPDarknet53-based YOLO detector was also adapted and retrained on the dataset, reaching 27.5% precision and 20.7% recall on the validation protocol. The results show that instance segmentation is a practical direction for field pavement imagery and aggregate crack-area estimation, while also exposing open challenges in annotation consistency, class imbalance, confounder rejection, and mask-level benchmarking.