CT2BSE: 3D BSE Microstructural Image Cross-Device Generation from µCT for Cement Hydration via Voxel Swin Transformer

Abstract

Acquiring three-dimensional(3D) microstructural images of cement hydration reveals critical microscale features essential for understanding hydration mechanisms and advancing material development. Micro-computed tomography(µCT) is widely used to capture these images due to its non-destructive, repeatable 3D imaging capability, despite at high operational cost. However, µCT suffers from limited resolution, weak texture, and missing phase information. In contrast, backscattered electron(BSE) provides high-resolution, phase-sensitive, and texture-rich images but are confined to 2D form. Inspired by the idea of fusing BSE style into µCT images for computationally imaging 3D BSE data, this paper proposes a cross-device generation method, termed CT2BSE, to construct 3D BSE microstructural images from µCT for cement hydration. A Voxel Swin Transformer is proposed to extract 3D μCT features by improving Video Swin Transformer with a Content-Aware Positional Encoding–3D, making encoder better suited for homogeneous images such as cement. Furthermore, a Holistic Style Injector–3D is proposed to fuse 3D μCT features with 2D BSE characteristics, thereby mitigating feature instability caused by the extreme intensity variations typically exhibited in cement images. Subsequently, the fused features are decoded into 3D volumes aligned with the BSE style while preserving original microstructure. Experimental results demonstrate that CT2BSE can generate high-fidelity 3D BSE images from μCT.