UC Santa Barbara

Electron backscatter diffraction (EBSD) is a scanning electron microscopy technique used for collecting orientation properties of a material sample over space at the micro-meter scale. Because collecting this data is known for being costly and time-consuming, various methods have been proposed to upsample collected data, or generate new microstructures from a latent space. We propose a novel interpolation algorithm for quaternions that is imprevious to symmetry switching, named Minimum Angle Transformation Spherical Linear Interpolation (Slerp-MAT). We also propose a new Physics-based loss function based on on this algorithm, to obtain state-of-the-art results, in terms of the angular difference of the superresolved data and the ground truth. The result is a $882\%$ reduction in mean angular distance of Superresolved versus Ground Truth data for the collected Nickel dataset with respect to the previous state-of-the-art loss function, and a $321\%$ reduction for the collected Titanium dataset.