The dataset of 3D structures and their corresponding 2D images was created using Blender [3], an
open source computer graphics suite used for 3D modeling, rendering, animation, and scientific
visualization. In this dataset, powders are comprised of spherical particles with sizes drawn at random from the appropriate PSD. We consider eight PSDs, as shown in Fig. 1, and construct 256
independent structure/image pairs for each PSD, resulting in 2048 synthetic powder micrographs
(examples are shown in Fig. 2).
To synthesize each image, we use an 11 11 2 (arbitrary Blender units) render volume and insert
800 particles placed at random. Particle radii are selected at random from one of the eight generating
PSDs, and they are permitted to intersect and/or occlude each other. Particles are rendered using a
spherical mesh, with a surface texture achieved by wrapping the particle with an image of zinc grains, included in the dataset. The particles are imaged on the z¼0 plane, which intersects the centroid of
the render volume, as shown in Fig. 3(b). The camera is located in the center of the volume at height
z¼10, and the resulting image resolution is 512 512 pixels. Python scripts used to perform these
operations are included in the dataset files.It is worth noting that the PSDs in Fig. 1 consist of four pairs of size distributions that are relatively
similar to each other. The characteristics of the PSDs are given in Table 1 and described in more detail
in