Materials Today Communications 37 (2023) 107407

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Materials Today Communications

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/mtcomm

Geometrical recognition of metallic foam microstructures using a deep

learning approach
William D. Romero a , Santiago Torres-Bermudez b , Brayan Valenzuela a , Cristian C. Viáfara c ,
Angel M. Meléndez b , Fabio Martínez a ,∗
a
Biomedical Imaging, Vision and Learning Laboratory (BIVL2 ab), Universidad Industrial de Santander (UIS), 680002, Colombia
b Grupo de Investigaciones en Minerales, Biohidrometalurgia y Ambiente (GIMBA), Universidad Industrial de Santander (UIS), 680002, Colombia
c Grupo de Investigaciones en corrosión (GIC), Universidad Industrial de Santander (UIS), 680002, Colombia

ARTICLE INFO ABSTRACT

Keywords: The geometric characteristics of nanostructured porous metallic foams (NMFs) impact their properties, enabling
Porous metals applications in electrocatalysis, energy conversion, and energy storage. The morphology of these three-
Electrochemical deposition dimensional (3D) structures is complex, in large part, because of their complicated formation mechanisms. This
Metal nanofoams
work presents a computational strategy for geometrically characterizing different NMFs designs. Three types
Auto-supervised architectures
of samples were synthesized using the dynamic hydrogen bubble template electrodeposition method. A set of
Deep representations
Embedded vectors
microscopic confocal images of NMFs was used as training input samples. Herein, a variational autoencoder
(VAE) was adjusted under a pretext task, allowing learning embedding descriptors to represent the geometry
of microscopic observations. To evaluate the feasibility of using a VAE to assist in the classification of NMFs,
a set of machine learning classifiers was implemented to discriminate among the groups of embedded vectors
according to their classes. Furthermore, the capacity of the VAE was validated regarding the capability to
separate the vectors according to their classes. Explainability mechanisms stand out geometrical features of
input images that had major support during the classification task.

1. Introduction possibilities for material development [6,7]. Integration of deep learn-

Metal nanofoams have emerged as a fascinating and promising
class of materials in recent years, thanks to their unique porous struc-
tures and remarkable properties, which include high surface area,
increased surface reactivity, and tunable morphology and composi-
tion [1]. These networks of metallic nanoparticles, combined with
interconnected porous structures, bring substantial advantages to elec-
tron and mass transport processes. This unique set of attributes makes
metal nanofoams highly versatile materials with promising applications
in electrochemical applications, ranging from catalysis to sensors and
energy storage to sustainable technologies [1–3]. Dynamic Hydrogen
Bubble Templated (DHBT) electrodeposition is an innovative electro-
chemical method that has garnered interest due to its operation at
atmospheric pressure and ambient temperature in a short period. By
leveraging the dynamic behavior of hydrogen bubbles at the electrode
surface, DHBT offers precise control over the deposition process, en-
abling the synthesis of complex and customizable structures [1,2,4,5].
The convergence of artificial intelligence, particularly deep learning,
has revolutionized various scientific domains, unlocking unprecedented
ing techniques with the study of metal nanofoams presents exciting
prospects for accelerating their discovery, optimization, and tailored
design.
Computer vision techniques allow, among other things, quantifying
properties, avoiding observation bias, and reducing costs associated
with the characterization of porous materials. For example, Chung et al.
estimated the mechanical properties of foamed samples by analyzing
X-ray micro-computed tomography (micro-CT) images [8]. In these
sequences, descriptors for pore circularity and relative density were
designed from binarized images, which were then validated with exper-
imental results. Liu et al. demonstrated the existence of a relationship
between the geometric parameters and the mechanical properties of
NMFs, following geometrical properties in binarized images taken from
scanning electron microscope [9]. Other approaches have correlated
microstructural properties with patterns in microscopic images using
deep representations [6]. Hiraide et al. proposed a methodology to
predict Young’s module of a polymer from microstructural observa-
tions [7]. To achieve this, a generative adversarial network (GAN)

∗ Corresponding author.
E-mail address: famarcar@saber.uis.edu.co (F. Martínez).

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.mtcomm.2023.107407
Received 27 August 2023; Received in revised form 13 October 2023; Accepted 22 October 2023
Available online 24 October 2023
2352-4928/© 2023 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
W.D. Romero et al.
Fig. 1. Schematic illustration of nanofoam synthesis by the dynamic hydrogen template method.
Source: Adapted from Plowman et al. [11].
Table 1
Sample labels and chemical composition of the electrodeposition baths.
Sample label Molar concentration (mol/L)
𝐶𝑢2+ 𝑁𝑖2+
MF1 0.30 0.10
MF2 0.25 0.15
MF3 0.20 0.20
learns material structure distribution from a latent space, while a
convolutional net outputs mechanical properties.
Taking into account that the microstructure of NMFs is the most im-
portant feature for high-performance electrochemical technologies be-
cause it affects the efficiency of electrochemical reactions and
convective-diffusive mass transport [3], this work introduces a deep
autoencoder representation that encodes the microstructure patterns of
metallic copper–nickel nanofoams, as observed in microscopic images.
This representation was constructed using a variational autoencoder
(VAE), and it is capable of describing hidden geometrical features de-
rived from embedding vectors learned during the image reconstruction
task. The embedding vector, as a geometrical representation, enables
the classification of copper–nickel (Cu–Ni) nanofoams.
2. Dataset
The NMFs were prepared following the dynamic hydrogen bubble
template method (DBTH) [5]. This method involves the use of a copper
substrate (cathode), which is immersed in an electrochemical cell filled
with an acid aqueous solution containing the dissolved metal cations to
be deposited. When an electric current of 3.0 A∕cm2 is applied to the
cathode, hydrogen bubbles are generated, creating empty spaces on the
cathode surface (porous space), and metal cations are transformed to
their metal form on the substrate. This method is an electrochemical
process that allows the formation of NMFs [10], as illustrated in Fig. 1.
Three types of NMF, hereafter called MF1, MF2, and MF3, were syn-
thesized from three different aqueous solutions in 1.5 M H2 SO4 with
different ratios of CuSO4 ⋅ 5H2 O and NiSO4 ⋅ 6H2 O. Table 1 shows the
composition of NMF types.
These NMFs were deposited on a flat copper substrate with a
geometrical area of 1 cm2 . Each type of NMF was characterized using a
confocal stereoscopic microscope with a magnification of 700x. A total
of 600 images of 1600 × 1200 pixels were recorded for the three NMFs
classes, forming a balanced dataset, i.e., 200 samples for each class.
Typical NMF samples for each composition are illustrated in Fig. 2.
3. Proposed approach
A Variational Autoencoder (VAE) encoding representation was
trained to reconstruct the NMFs’ microscopic images. The adjusted VAE
generates embedding nanofoam descriptors, representing a latent repre-
sentation that codes multiple normal distributions of hidden features.
2
Materials Today Communications 37 (2023) 107407
Each embedding represents a NMF class within a sample group that
shares chemical compositions. Thus, the embedding representation and
spatial attention maps allow support for geometrical characterization.
The general pipeline of the proposed approach is illustrated in Fig. 3.
3.1. A variational autoencoder deep representation
Herein the main interest is to capture geometrical features from
observed NMFs without an explicit adjustment about explicit shape
signatures, such as pore diameter, pore distribution, and perimeters,
among others. Hence, an autoencoder architecture was adjusted, fol-
lowing a pretext task for image reconstruction. Specifically, we take
advantage of a VAE to adjust latent vectors as a set of Normal dis-
tributions with [𝜇𝑖 , 𝜎𝑖 ] [12,13]. This architecture is trained with NFM
images using different chemical compositions and without class label
information. We hypothesize that such embedding descriptors summa-
rize geometrical nanofoam’s features, expressed as a set of Gaussian
distributions. Specifically, the VAE is composed of an encoder that takes
input images 𝑥 and turns them into a lower-dimensional latent variable
𝑧. Then, a decoder branch is charged to recover images 𝑥, ̂ following a
binary-cross entropy reconstruction loss [14], expressed as in Eq. (1):
1 ∑∑
𝑀 𝑛
𝑅𝐿𝑜𝑠𝑠 = − [𝑥 𝑙𝑜𝑔(𝑥̂ 𝑗,𝑖 ) + (1 − 𝑥𝑗,𝑖 )𝑙𝑜𝑔(1 − 𝑥̂ 𝑗,𝑖 )] (1)
𝑀 𝑖=1 𝑗=1 𝑗,𝑖
Particularly, the VAE architecture adjusts latent representation to a
standard Gaussian-probabilistic distribution  (𝑂, 𝐼) with mean 𝜇 = 0
and standard deviation 𝜎 equal to the identity matrix (𝐼) [13,15].
The VAE architecture is also adjusted concerning the Kullback–Leibler
divergence, described as:
∑
𝐾
𝐾𝐿𝑙𝑜𝑠𝑠 = −0.5 ∗ (1 + 𝑙𝑜𝑔(𝜎 2 ) − 𝜇 2 − 𝜎 2 ) (2)
𝑖=1
The minimization of this error implies that the values of the latent
spaces variables tend to be similar to a Gaussian distribution, allowing
the model to build a continuous latent space that contains the spatial
distribution of the visual features of the NMF images [16,17]. It should
be noted that the decoder should input a one-dimensional vector until
achieving a 𝑥 image reconstruction, making it easier to backpropagate
the error. Then, the 2D embedding vectors (𝜇𝑖 , 𝜎𝑖 ) are reparametrized
as a linear combination that outputs a 𝑍 sampling vector [17,18],
expressed as:
𝑧 = 𝜇 + 𝑙𝑜𝑔(𝜎) ∗ 𝜖 ∀ 𝜖 ∈  (0, 𝐼) (3)
Hence, the VAEs are trained with a total error equation, which was
introduced as the linear combination of both errors, as can be seen
in Eq. (4).
𝐸𝐿𝐵𝑂 = 𝐾𝐿𝐿𝑜𝑠𝑠 + 𝑅𝐿𝑜𝑠𝑠 (4)
W.D. Romero et al.
Fig. 2. Typical copper–nickel metallic foams microscopic images of each class in the dataset.
Fig. 3. Computational methodology for structural analysis of NMFs images. First, a VAE is trained. Next, the embedded vectors are projected to explore their conformation in a
low-dimensional latent space. In addition, a set of explainability maps supports the visual inspection task on the learned geometric features.
3.2. Embedding nanofoam descriptors
The latent space regularization obtained from the VAE allows the
creation of a descriptor that encodes the geometric and structural prop-
erties of the input NMF images. The set of learned normal distributions
then forms a latent space that can be explored for property recognition
in materials, searching for elements that share similar mechanical
properties or measuring the degree of alloying between elements that
aid in synthesizing NMFs. In addition, the generation of new synthetic
embeddings taken from the latent space can simulate the conformation
and synthesis of new NMFs [19].
Once the visual descriptors are obtained from VAE as embedded
vectors that provide particular responses to input images, their sub-
sequent analysis can be performed through dimensionality reduction.
This dimensionality reduction allows, among others things, the recog-
nition of the data’s geometry the observation of possible patterns that
correlate with material properties, and can also serve as activation
maps to retrieve the most salient information from the learned vectors.
Thus, we can effectively address the above problems using techniques
like PCA or LDA. Two dimensional reduction strategies were herein
implemented, described as follows
Unsupervised dimensional-reduction from PCA. This procedure is used
for dimensional reduction of information computing principal compo-
nents as linear combinations of the initial variables [20]. Each principal
component, from an eigenvector decomposition, is a linear combination
of the original dimensions, where, the first component has the highest
variance of the points.
Supervised dimensional-reduction from LDA. A Linear Discriminant Anal-
ysis (LDA) is a supervised method for dimensional reduction. This
technique is used to find new bases that present a better discrimination
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Materials Today Communications 37 (2023) 107407
among classes by quantifying the variance in the data [21]. For this
purpose, two different types of variances are taken into account: the
within-class variance (𝑆𝑤𝑖 ), and the between-class variance (𝑆𝑏𝑖 ), which
are measures of the dispersion of the data from the same and from
different classes, respectively. The 𝑊 transformation matrix of the LDA
can be calculated as:
𝑆𝑊 𝑊 = 𝜆𝑆𝐵 𝑊 (5)
where 𝜆 represents the eigenvalues of the transformation matrix 𝑊 .
By selecting the 𝑘 most important eigenvalues, we can construct a
matrix 𝑉𝑘 containing the eigenvectors associated with those selected
eigenvalues. From this new matrix, it is possible to project the original
points 𝑋 to a new lower-dimensional space 𝑌 , as shown in Eq. (6).
𝑌 = 𝑋 ∗ 𝑊𝐾 (6)
3.3. Explainable attention maps
To support geometrical analysis from the embedding descriptors, in
this work, these learned distributions were backpropagated to the orig-
inal image to determine principal regions associated with a particular
descriptor. A modification to the Grad-CAM methodology was imple-
mented here to recover attention maps from embedding distributions
(see in Fig. 4).
Particularly, for each element 𝑧𝑖 , the gradients are propagated with
respect to the features map 𝐴 ∈ R𝑁×𝐻×𝑊 , to obtain the activation map
𝑀 𝑖 [22].
∑
𝑛
𝑀 𝑖 = 𝑅𝑒𝐿𝑈 ( 𝛼𝑘 𝐴𝑘 ) (7)
𝑘=1
W.D. Romero et al.
Fig. 4. The application of Grad-CAM to a VAE is different from the application to common convolutional classification networks. In this case, since it does not output an activation
of a softmax layer, the Grad-CAM prediction is not based on class probability. Instead, what it seeks is to find the zones of interest learned by each dimension of the embedded
vector 𝑧.
𝛿𝑧
where the scalar 𝛼𝑘 is the global average 𝐺𝐴𝑃 ( 𝛿𝐴𝑖 ) of each element 𝑧𝑖
𝑘
with respect to the 𝑘th channel of the features map 𝐴 of the selected
convolutional layer calculated, as:
1 ∑ ∑ 𝛿𝑧𝑖
ℎ 𝑤
𝛼𝑘 = ( )
𝑤𝐱ℎ 𝑝=1 𝑞=1 𝛿𝐴𝑝𝑞
𝑘
where 𝐴𝑝𝑞𝑘
is the value of a pixel at position (𝑝, 𝑞). This process is re-
peated for each of the elements of the embedded vector [𝑧1 , 𝑧2 , … , 𝑧𝐷 ],
which allows us to obtain an activation map for each element in the
embedded vector. In addition, it is also possible to obtain a total
saliency map from any linear combination between the individual
maps. Hence, we can obtain a single saliency map 𝑀 by averaging all
the individual maps.
1 ∑ 𝑖
𝐷
𝑀= 𝑀 (9)
𝐷 𝑖=1
These saliency maps pay more attention to the regions or structures
that are encoded in the embedded vector. In the application of NMFs
analysis, it can be a relevant tool to determine the importance and
contribution of each of the learned distributions, using the mean value
of each distribution as an approximation. For example, experts can
identify differential relationships in the geometry and structure of the
NMFs, which can lead them to hypothesize new nanofoam syntheses
and investigate different chemical compositions.
4. Experimental setup
The encoder of the proposed architecture receives 128 × 128 images
which are coded by four 2D convolutional layers. The first three layers
of the network have an associated MaxPooling2D operation and normal-
ization of the activations (Batch Normalization). The number of filters
associated with each layer are 512, 256, 128, and 64, respectably.
The last layer was projected to the embedded vectors representing the
distributions [𝜇, 𝜎] with 64 units for each parameter. Additionally, a
linear combination of the last two dense layers was performed to obtain
a 𝑧 vector of 64 elements.
The decoder receives 64 elements, which are progressively con-
volved (with filters of size 3 × 3) using 2D upsampling layers and a
batch normalization layer. The last layer was dedicated to recovering
the original representation (128 × 128 pixels), with a sigmoid activa-
tion. For the end-to-en, the Adam optimizer was implemented with a
learning rate of 0.000001, during 2000 epochs, and a batch size of 16
images.
Once the architecture was trained, embedded vectors of 64 scalar
values were obtained, which are taken as compact descriptors related
to the structure of the observed images. These embedded vectors were
derived from the response vector of the means and variances, and
also the latent vector z. These embedded vectors were projected to
a low-dimensional space under a supervised scheme using the LDA.
Explainability maps were also obtained as a tool for observational
inspection of the main regions and structural features recovering 64
saliency maps generated in response to the mean vector.
Materials Today Communications 37 (2023) 107407
5. Evaluation and results
For validation, to classify resultant embeddings, three conventional
machine learning architectures were used: KNN, Random Forest, and
(8) Decision Trees. As a computational baseline, a simple autoencoder was
implemented with the same layer configuration and hyperparameters
as the VAE architecture. For this evaluation, we changed the embedded
vector size, using 512, 256 and 128 dimensions. With each of these
models, the capability to classify between NMFs was evaluated using
the mean 𝜇, variance 𝜎, and latent vector 𝑧 generated by the VAE.
The ability to discriminate the embedded vectors from the conventional
architecture was also evaluated. Table 2 summarizes the achieved result
for each embedding configuration and regarding each classifier. The
analysis of each of the components evidences the ability to geometri-
cally characterize NMFs based on the distribution of features within an
embedded space.
The best classification results were obtained for the embedded
vector of the variance (𝜎). This discriminative character may be asso-
ciated with the difference between learned distributions, based on the
dispersion of their data. That is, the distributions between classes can
be separated by their dispersion, but they share similar mean values.
It can be observed an inverse relationship between the size of the
embedding the accuracy of the models to classify the NMFs. So, low
128-dimensional vectors are sufficient to represent the problem in the
embedded space.
Subsequently, the resulting embedded vectors (dimension 128) were
projected to a low-dimensional space from unsupervised PCA. Fig. 5
illustrates the representations of each type of embedded vector (𝜇, 𝜎, 𝑧),
and the geometric space in both the training (right column) and eval-
uation (left column) phases. As can be seen, the 𝜎 vector has a better
geometrical representation, achieving a clearer separation between the
three different compositions of the NMFs. Thus, geometric features can
be well encoded without label information about the composition. In
contrast, the projection of the 𝜇 and 𝑧 vectors does not prove to be
discriminative in either group, both training and evaluation.
Also, in a low-dimensional experiment, the embedded vectors were
projected to a two-dimensional space, but following a supervised
scheme, through the LDA vector. The resulting embedded spaces for
each projection, both in training and evaluation, can be seen in Fig. 6.
In this case, the NFM type label has an direct impact on the dis-
crimination of the embedded space, resulting in geometrics with well-
separated features. The impact on minimization in this case has a
high component, which may make the representation dependent on the
observations in the dataset, rather than solely on the characterization
of the image geometries themselves.
Fig. 7 shows saliency maps for three different compositions standing
out the most salient regions, coded into compact descriptor, to carry
out the reconstruction. These reconstruction maps were taken from
mean vector embedding, which provides a closer approximation to
the reconstruction. In these images we can see that within the set of
dimensions of the embedded vector, there are elements that contain
features corresponding to different components of the nanofoam, such
as pores and matrix.
Besides, from set of variance embedded vectors, we analyzed
whether the spatial distribution of the vectors contains the visual
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W.D. Romero et al. Materials Today Communications 37 (2023) 107407

Fig. 5. Representations of each type of embedded vector (𝜇, 𝜎, 𝑧), of each NMFs class (MF1, MF2 and MF3) and the geometric space in both training (right column) and evaluation
(left column) are shown for PCA.

Fig. 6. Representations of each type of embedded vector (𝜇, 𝜎, 𝑧), of each NMFs class (MF1, MF2 and MF3) and the geometric space in both training (right column) and evaluation
(left column) are shown for LDA.

Fig. 7. Grad-Cam activations for different dimensions of the 𝜇 embedding for each class of NMFs.

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W.D. Romero et al. Materials Today Communications 37 (2023) 107407

Table 2
Machine learning models used for the classification of embedded vectors from different VAE architectures and three conventional architectures with the same
configuration. In this case, 𝜇 corresponds to the mean vector, 𝜎 to the variance vector, and 𝑧 is the linear combination of the two. These three vectors are
generated by the VAE coding architecture. In this case, conv refers to the embedded vector obtained from a conventional autoencoder with the same layer
configuration.
Approach 128 256 512
𝜇 𝜎 z conv 𝜇 𝜎 z conv 𝜇 𝜎 z conv
Decision Trees 0.82 0.9 0.59 0.81 0.8 0.87 0.52 0.79 0.8 0.86 0.44 0.8
KNN 0.66 0.92 0.66 0.44 0.65 0.8 0.63 0.52 0.62 0.69 0.58 0.49
Random Forest 0.88 0.98 0.86 0.83 0.87 0.94 0.76 0.93 0.87 0.92 0.63 0.83

Fig. 8. Distribution over the 2D latent space of the set of variance-embedded vectors for the test data set. Some of the data at the extremes of each class were also selected to
observe the distribution of the nanofoam characteristics.

characteristics of the NMFs within the latent space, as well as the
possibility of creating artificial images of new nanofoam configurations
from the reconstruction of new embedded vectors. Fig. 8 shows the
distribution of the embedded vectors of the two-dimensional variance
(PCA) for the dataset of testing. From this dataset, we project images
corresponding to some of the vectors into the space, thus observing a
transformation in the size and number of pores as we move over the
latent space.
6. Discussion and concluding remarks
This work introduced a variational autoencoder to describe ge-
ometrical patterns corresponding to nanostructured porous metallic
foams with three different Cu/Ni ratios. The autoencoder was trained
following an image reconstruction task and succeeded in encoding
embedded vectors with the ability to discriminate between geometries
of three different nanofoam compositions.
Furthermore, through observations using a confocal microscope, we
codified nanostructured porous metallic foam patterns as embedded
descriptors to represent the geometrical features. These descriptors
may constitute an alternative characterization of metallic copper–nickel
nanofoams, in this specific application, without involving tedious anal-
ysis and under-simplified pore measurements. Besides, these descrip-
tors have discrimination capabilities from machine learning strategies,
achieving accuracy levels above 90%. The variance vector monitors the
dispersion of the reconstruction, which is indicative in the classification
but is not consistent with the reconstruction information.
Additionally, the results showed that experimental environments
can be simulated for the construction of NMFs. This fact holds great
potential for experts in the field to validate the geometrical features,
concerning different copper–nickel compositions. Certainly, the num-
ber of types of NMF prepared was small to initially explore the effect of
nickel content on copper NMF, considering that both elements exhibit
unlimited solubility when forming an alloy. From the findings achieved
in this specific experimental setup, it is expected to carry out further
experimental analysis of other NMF types, with a larger number of
observational samples, to measure the characterization capability of the
proposed methodology. As an alternative tool, explainability maps were
also obtained, which can provide evidence of the geometrical compo-
nents encoded in the embedded vector. Thus, the autoencoder focuses
features such as pore spacing and pore geometry, characteristics used
by the experts during the analysis of nanofoams. Likewise, the analysis
carried out from microstructures of porous electrodes allows for the
understanding of mechanical properties from different compositions.
Such analyses are far from being definitive criteria for transferring this
technology in large-scale implementations. Nonetheless, these findings
may be predominant in practical engineering applications. Recently,
some efforts have been introduced in the literature, describing for
instance, how to fabricate Ni electrodes by DHBT [23].
Future works should include the exploration of new computational
architectures that can represent geometric characteristics and discrimi-
nate between different chemical compositions of the material. We also
intend to investigate the image analysis with observations in other
magnifications so that the computational tools can meet experimental
requirements that can be costly or time-consuming in the synthesis
of the NMFs. It should be noted that reported results were obtained
on a specific and limited dataset of copper–nickel nanofoams, explor-
ing structural information observed from confocal images. However,
the achieved results show potential applicability to support metallic
nanofoams analysis, and a major exhaustive study should be carried out
with a larger dataset to establish significant and statistical differences
among different compositions.

6
W.D. Romero et al.
CRediT authorship contribution statement
William D. Romero: Methodology, Software, Visualization, Writing
– review & editing. Santiago Torres-Bermudez: Data curation, Visu-
alization, Writing – review & editing. Brayan Valenzuela: Software,
Supervision, Writing – review & editing. Cristian C. Viáfara: Investi-
gation, Conceptualization, Methodology, Supervision, Funding acquisi-
tion, Writing – review & editing. Angel M. Meléndez: Investigation,
Conceptualization, Methodology, Supervision, Funding acquisition, Re-
sources, Writing – review & editing. Fabio Martínez: Investigation,
Conceptualization, Methodology, Supervision, Funding acquisition, Re-
sources, Writing – review & editing.
Declaration of competing interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing finan-
cial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to
influence the work reported in this paper.
Data availability
Data will be made available on request.
Acknowledgments
This work was financially supported by Universidad Industrial de
Santander (Project 3733).
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