From Voxels to Ellipsoids: Application to Pore Space Geometrical Modelling

This paper deals with the representation of complex volume shapes using a piece wise approximation by ellipsoids. The principle consists in optimizing a functional including an error term and a scale term. The result is a set of tangent or disjoint ellipsoids representing the shape in an intrinsic way. We propose a general scheme that we apply to 3D soil pore space modelling from volume Computed Tomography images. Within this specific context, we validate our geometrical modelling by using it for water draining simulation in porous media.