In this article, we propose a smart image-analysis method suitable for extracting target features with hierarchical dimension from original data. The method was applied to three-dimensional volume data of an all-solid lithium-ion battery obtained by the automated sequential sample milling and imaging process using a focused ion beam/scanning electron microscope to investigate the spatial configuration of voids inside the battery. To automatically fully extract the shape and location of the voids, three types of filters were consecutively applied: a median blur filter to extract relatively larger voids, a morphological opening operation filter for small dot-shaped voids and a morphological closing operation filter for small voids with concave contrasts. Three data cubes separately processed by the above-mentioned filters were integrated by a union operation to the final unified volume data, which confirmed the correct extraction of the voids over the entire dimension contained in the original data.
Keywords: Avizo fire; all-solid-state lithium-ion battery; data-cube analysis; image analysis; union operation; void analysis.
© The Author 2015. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Japanese Society of Microscopy. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com.