Nanoscale Microscopy Images Colourisation Using Neural Networks

Microscopy images are powerful tools and widely used in the majority of research areas, such as biology, chemistry, physics and materials fields by various microscopies (Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM), Atomic Force Microscope (AFM) and the optical microscope, et al.). However, most of the microscopy images are colourless due to the unique imaging mechanism. Though investigating on some popular solutions proposed recently about colourizing microscopy images, we notice the process of those methods are usually tedious, complicated, and time-consuming. In this paper, inspired by the achievement of machine learning algorithms on different science fields, we introduce two artificial neural networks for grey microscopy image colourization: An end-to-end convolutional neural network (CNN) with a pre-trained model for feature extraction and a pixel-to-pixel Neural Style Transfer convolutional neural network (NST-CNN) which can colourize grey microscopy images with semantic information learned from a user-provided colour image at inference time. Our results show that our algorithm not only could able to colour the microscopy images under complex circumstances precisely but also make the colour naturally according to a massive number of nature images training with proper hue and saturation.