Visualization of quality of 3D tomographic images in construction of digital rock model

Various types of tomography are widely employed in oil and gas industry for studying structure of rocks. Using X-ray or FIB-SEM tomography, a 3D model of a core sample is con-structed for mathematical simulations of fluid flow in porous media and evaluation of physi-cal characteristics of rock. Since images have various defects and distortions, there is a prob-lem of selection of a fragment with the best quality from the initial 3D image. At the moment this operation is made manually on the basis of an expert's opinion and takes significant time. In this paper, we investigate applicability of existing non-reference quality metrics for evalua-tion of tomographic images and propose the approach for visualization of spatial change of 3D image quality. The method includes the construction of central cross-section; plotting graphs of quality and similarity measures for each slice over the cross-section; generation of combined heat map of quality of cubic fragments with various size. The proposed approach significantly accelerates and makes less subjective selection of the best region for further simulations in digital rock workflow. The choice of colour scale is considered to facilitate the analysis of graphical information for people with colour vision deficiency. © 2020 National Research Nuclear University. All rights reserved.