This work presents
the development and implementation
of a deep
learning-based workflow for autonomous image analysis in nanoscience.
A versatile, agnostic, and configurable tool was developed to generate
instance-segmented imaging datasets of nanoparticles. The synthetic
generator tool employs domain randomization to expand the image/mask
pairs dataset for training supervised deep learning models. The approach
eliminates tedious manual annotation and allows training of high-performance
models for microscopy image analysis based on convolutional neural
networks. We demonstrate how the expanded training set can significantly
improve the performance of the classification and instance segmentation
models for a variety of nanoparticle shapes, ranging from spherical-,
cubic-, to rod-shaped nanoparticles. Finally, the trained models were
deployed in a cloud-based analytics platform for the autonomous particle
analysis of microscopy images.