Application of Multiple Artifact Correction in Digital Core Pore
Structure Extraction
Abstract
Digital core techniques based on CT scan imaging can accurately describe
the pore space of rocks, which provides a significant tool for studying
the influence of rock pore structure on its macroscopic physical
properties. However, with the increasingly intensive use of CT scanning
in the field of petrophysics, the various artifactual interferences
accompanying the imaging itself have become more prominent. Common
artifacts in core CT scanning imaging include ring artifacts, star
artifacts, and hardening artifacts, etc. The presence of these artifacts
greatly affects the imaging quality and as a result further affect the
quality of subsequent image processing and segmentation. Therefore, the
correction of scanning artifacts is very important. Generally, the
artifacts are eliminated by improving scanning experiments or image
processing. However, these traditional artifact correction methods,
especially for hardening artifacts, have some common problems, such as
unclean elimination or poor applicability. To solve the problems, we
propose a new method for artifact correction. In this method, we
calculate a local correction curve (surface) by sliding the 3D window
vertically, and use this curve (surface) to eliminate hardening artifact
interference in both vertical and horizontal directions. By applying the
method to the digital cores, we find that it is not only effective in
removing the effects of multiple artifacts but also in preserving the
original slice information. The results show that the same density
voxels corrected by bi-directional artifacts in the vertical and
horizontal directions were more consistent in the gray-scale
distribution, which means that the corrected slices avoided
over-segmentation in the central region and extracted the complete pore
structure in the edge region. As a result, the corrected high-quality
core slices can be obtained. On this basis, we further compare the pore
aspect ratio and specific surface area parameters extracted from the
corrected and non-corrected slices. It shows that the artifacts
correction has a significant effect on the extraction results of pore
structure parameters, which reflects the importance of artifact
correction in scanning imaging.