FeM dataset – An iron ore labeled images dataset for segmentation training and testing

This dataset is composed of 81 pairs of correlated images. Each pair contains one image of an iron ore sample acquired through reflected light microscopy (RGB, 24-bit), and the corresponding binary reference image (8-bit), in which the pixels are labeled as belonging to one of two classes: ore (0) or embedding resin (255).

The sample came from an itabiritic iron ore concentrate from Quadrilátero Ferrífero (Brazil) mainly composed of hematite and quartz, with little magnetite and goethite. It was classified by size and concentrated with a dense liquid. Then, the fraction -149+105 μm with density greater than 3.2 was cold mounted with epoxy resin and subsequently ground and polished.

Correlative microscopy was employed for image acquisition. Thus, 81 fields were imaged on a reflected light microscope with a 10× (NA 0.20) objective lens and on a scanning electron microscope (SEM). In sequence, they were registered, resulting in images of 999×756 pixels with a resolution of 1.05 µm/pixel. Finally, the images from SEM were thresholded to generate the reference images.

Further description of this sample and its imaging procedure can be found in the work by Gomes and Paciornik (2012).

This dataset was created for developing and testing deep learning models on semantic segmentation tasks. The paper of Filippo et al. (2021) presented a variant of the DeepLabv3+ model that reached mean values of 91.43% and 93.13% for overall accuracy and F1 score, respectively, for 5 rounds of experiments (training and testing), each with a different, random initialization of network weights.

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If you use this dataset in your own work, please cite this DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.5014700

Please also cite this paper, which provides additional details about the dataset:

Michel Pedro Filippo, Otávio da Fonseca Martins Gomes, Gilson Alexandre Ostwald Pedro da Costa, Guilherme Lucio Abelha Mota. Deep learning semantic segmentation of opaque and non-opaque minerals from epoxy resin in reflected light microscopy images. Minerals Engineering, Volume 170, 2021, 107007, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.mineng.2021.107007.