Fast Segmentation of 4D Microtomography Volumes from Core-flooding
Experiments in Porous Rock using Convolutional Neural Network
Abstract
Multiphase fluid flow in porous media has been extensively studied for
its applications in carbon capture and storage, hydrocarbon recovery,
aquifer contamination, soil hydrology and subsurface energy resources.
Fluid displacement in porous media can be investigated using highly
time-resolved synchrotron X-ray microtomography. One consequence of
extremely fast imaging can be compromised image quality, including noise
and decreased contrast, which makes the images hard to be segmented. We
trained an established convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture
(U-Net) with 18,072 images from multiphase flow experiments generated by
synchrotron μCT. The trained neural network can segment synchrotron μCT
images of core-flooding experiments rapidly and accurately without any
pre-processing of the raw image. Segmenting one μCT scan volume of size
1004x496x496 takes 5.6 minutes on an Nvidia Quadro K5200 GPU, while a
conventional segmentation pipeline using CPU for the same size data
takes 50.2 minutes. On the test dataset, the AUC-ROC score of individual
class reached above 0.99 and the mean accuracy of the three segmentation
classes reached 99%. The average IoU of the three classes is 0.98. The
accuracy of the CNN segmentation is of the same order as conventional
methods but it is significantly faster.