Texture based image classification for nanoparticle surface characterisation and machine learning

Restricting materials informatics to the numerical parameters output from conventional materials modelling software restricts us to a subset of machine learning methods capable of uncovering structure/property relationships and driving materials discovery and design. Presented here is a simple way of converting materials structures in to unique image-based fingerprints suitable for image processing methods, that does not require subjective preassessment of the data and selection of descriptors by the user. This combination of methods is shown to classify the morphologies in a set of 425 silver nanoparticles in a meaningful way, and predict the correlation with the energy of the Fermi level in agreement with other machine learning methods that required user intervention. Moving to an image-based, rather than feature list-based, description of nanoparticles and materials brings us one step closer to using experimental micrographs as inputs for machine learning.