IPSM-Bench: A New Intermediate Phase Segmentation Benchmark in Microstructure Images of Zinc-Based Absorbable Biomaterials

IPSM-Bench: A New Intermediate Phase Segmentation Benchmark in Microstructure Images of Zinc-Based Absorbable Biomaterials

Jinglin Xu, Shangyan Zhao, Jiabo Wang, Xinghong Mu, Yulong Lei, Jiacheng Zhang, Hongbo Sun, Yageng Li

Proceedings of the Thirty-Fifth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main Track. Pages 1929-1937. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2026/215

Zinc-based alloys are indispensable emerging absorbable metallic biomaterials, and their macroscopic performance is governed by microstructural characteristics. Intermediate phases—key microstructural constituents—are pivotal in regulating mechanical and functional properties. However, intermediate phase segmentation in zinc alloy microstructures faces formidable challenges: scarce annotated datasets, low contrast, difficulty detecting small targets, and heterogeneous morphologies. To this end, we construct IPSM-Bench, the largest high-quality dataset for zinc-alloy intermediate phase segmentation. Furthermore, we propose SCoP-SAM, a new Spatial Context Prior-guided SAM method that leverages the gradient structure and grayscale properties of intermediate phases to capture spatial context priors and incorporates them into the entire SAM encoding-decoding process, improving segmentation performance. Based on the proposed IPSM-Bench, we establish a new benchmark for intermediate phase segmentation to systematically evaluate state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods and advance research on zinc alloy microstructure analysis. Extensive experiments on IPSM-Bench and additional public alloy benchmarks demonstrate that our SCoP-SAM not only achieves SOTA performance for zinc-alloy intermediate phase segmentation but also generalizes remarkably well to other alloy scenarios.
Keywords:
Computer Vision: Segmentation, grouping and shape analysis
Multidisciplinary Topics and Applications: Other