A multiangle polarised imaging-based method for thin section segmentation

The most crucial task of petroleum geology is to explore oil and gas reservoirs in the deep underground. As one of the analysis techniques in petroleum geological research, rock thin section identification method includes particle segmentation, which is one of the key steps. A conventional sandstone thin section image typically contains hundreds of mineral particles with blurred boundaries and complex microstructures inside the particles. Moreover, the complex lithology and low porosity of tight sandstone make traditional image segmentation methods unsuitable for solving the complex thin section segmentation problems. This paper combines petrology and image processing technologies. First, polarised sequence images are aligned, and then the images are transformed to the HSV colour space to extract pores. Second, particles are extracted according to their extinction characteristics. Last, a concavity and corner detection matching method is used to process the extracted particles, thereby completing the segmentation of sandstone thin section images. The experimental results show that our proposed method can more accurately fit the boundaries of mineral particles in sandstone images than existing image segmentation methods. Additionally, when applied in actual production scenarios, our method exhibits excellent performance, greatly improving thin section identification efficiency and significantly assisting experts in identification.