GPU-Enabled Interactive Pore Detection for 3D Rock Visualization

Abstract

Visualization of porous media is of great importance to several scientific fields, including the petroleum technology. The topic of this thesis arises from our collaborations with The Center for Integrated Operations in the Petroleum Industry. By being able to quickly analyze properties of porous rocks, they can get a better understanding of how to efficiently harvest oil since oil is typically held and stored within rock pores. The petroleum industry typically uses Computed Tomography (CT) technology to scan rock samples for their internal structures. The resulting data is loaded into a computer program that generates 3D models of the rocks describing the 3D nature of its' internal structure. The scan data created from these scans will in most case contain inaccuracies due to artifacts created while scanning. In this thesis, we develop an application that interactively helps the user localizes the rock and pores in the CT scan data, allowing the user to create an image with a more accurate representation of the pores. We use digital image processing techniques to do an initial localization of the elements in the scan. The artifacts are then reduced by allowing the user to drag and pull on the line-data specifying the pores. Our implementation then uses this new representation to construct a 3D volume image that can be used in geophysical applications, like Schlumberger Petrel, for further analysis and simulation. The volume rendering part of our implementations builds directly on the authors project work with Eirik Ola Aksnes on GPU Techniques for Porous Rock Visualization completed last fall (2008).