Unsupervised texture classification of 3D X-ray Micro-computed Tomography images

Characterizing rock proprieties is crucial in the oilfield to evaluate hydrocarbon reserves. Several studies showed a high correlation between rock properties and textures. Therefore, we propose integrating texture information in the images to identify precisely the most representative textures in highly heterogeneous rocks to estimate their properties. First, we implemented a steerable pyramid decomposition to extract the texture features. Then, those parameters were used as input for the Self-organizing map to classify the textures. Finally, by applying several models and comparing their results, we suggested the best approach to implement for texture classification.