Chemical crystal identification with deep learning machine vision.

Objective: This study was carried out with the purpose of testing the ability of deep learning machine vision to identify microscopic objects and geometries found in chemical crystal structures.

Results: A database of 6994 images taken with a light microscope showing microscopic crystal details of selected chemical compounds along with 180 images of an unknown chemical was created to train and test, respectively the deep learning models. The models used were GoogLeNet (22 layers deep network) and VGG-16 (16 layers deep network), based on the Caffe framework (University of California, Berkeley, CA) of the DIGITS platform (NVIDIA Corporation, Santa Clara, CA). The two models were successfully trained with the images, having validation accuracy values of 97.38% and 99.65% respectively. Finally, both models were able to correctly identify the unknown chemical sample with a high probability score of 93.34% (GoogLeNet) and 99.41% (VGG-16). The positive results found in this study can be further applied to other unknown sample identification tasks using light microscopy coupled with deep learning machine vision.