# FibeR-CNN: Expanding Mask R-CNN to Improve Image-Based Fiber Analysis Source: [FibeR-CNN: Expanding Mask R-CNN to Improve Image-Based Fiber Analysis]() Collection index: [llms.txt]() Data updated: 2025-10-25T22:40:59.400Z Authors: Max Frei, Frank Einar Kruis Published: 2020-06-08T13:03:09.000Z ## Abstract Fiber-shaped materials (e.g. carbon nano tubes) are of great relevance, due to their unique properties but also the health risk they can impose. Unfortunately, image-based analysis of fibers still involves manual annotation, which is a time-consuming and costly process. We therefore propose the use of region-based convolutional neural networks (R-CNNs) to automate this task. Mask R-CNN, the most widely used R-CNN for semantic segmentation tasks, is prone to errors when it comes to the analysis of fiber-shaped objects. Hence, a new architecture - FibeR-CNN - is introduced and validated. FibeR-CNN combines two established R-CNN architectures (Mask and Keypoint R-CNN) and adds additional network heads for the prediction of fiber widths and lengths. As a result, FibeR-CNN is able to surpass the mean average precision of Mask R-CNN by 33 % (11 percentage points) on a novel test data set of fiber images. ## Recorded benchmark results A research result applies to its stated dataset, split, metric and evaluation configuration. Compare like-for-like settings, preserve the metric's unit and direction, and distinguish paper-reported results from independent reproduction. The best result recorded here is not a claim of exhaustive, current global coverage. ## Original sources and implementation [Original paper]() [PDF]()