Representing geometric structures in 3D tomography soil images: Application to pore-space modeling

Only in the last decade have geoscientists started to use 3D computed tomography (CT) images of soil for better understanding and modeling of soil properties. In this paper, we propose one of the first approaches to allow the definition and computation of stable (intrinsic) geometric representations of structures in 3D CT soil images. This addresses the open problem set by the description of volume shapes from discrete traces without any a priori information. The basic concept involves representing the volume shape by a piecewise approximation using simple volume primitives (bowls, cylinders, cones, etc.). This typical representation is assumed to optimize a criterion ensuring its stability. This criterion includes the representation scale, which characterizes the trade-off between the fitting error and the number of patches. We also take into account the preservation of topological properties of the initial shape: the number of connected components, adjacency relationships, etc. We propose an efficient computation method for this piecewise approximation using cylinders or bowls. For cylinders, we use optimal region growing in a valuated adjacency graph that represents the primitives and their adjacency relationships. For bowls, we compute a minimal set of Delaunay spheres recovering the skeleton. Our method is applied to modeling of a coarse pore space extracted from 3D CT soil images. The piecewise bowls approximation gives a geometric formalism corresponding to the intuitive notion of pores and also an efficient way to compute it. This geometric and topological representation of coarse pore space can be used, for instance, to simulate biological activity in soil. (c) 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.