Category Archives: Tutorial

Using Python to calculate northern hemisphere’s surface land coverage

Posted on by
2

Yesterday during my lunch break I was rather bored; it is unseasonably cold for the fall, even in Calgary, and a bit foggy too.
For something to do I browsed the Earth Science beta on Stack Exchange looking for interesting questions (as an aside, I encourage readers to look at the unanswered questions).
There was one that piqued my curiosity, “In the northern hemisphere only, what percentage of the surface is land?”.
It occurred to me that I could get together an answer using an equal area projection map and a few lines of Python code; and indeed in 15 minutes I whipped-up this workflow:

  • Invert and import this B/W image of equal area projection (Peters) for the Northern hemisphere (land = white pixels).
Peters_projection,_black_north

Source of original image (full globe): Wikimedia Commons

  • Store the image as a Numpy array.
  • Calculate the total number of pixels in the image array (black + white).
  • Calculate the total number of white pixels (1s) by summing the entire array. Black pixels (0s) will not contribute.
  • Calculate percentage of white pixels.

The result I got is 40.44%. Here’s the code:

# import libraries
import numpy as np
from skimage import io
from matplotlib import pyplot as plt

# import image
url = 'https://mycartablog.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/peters_projection_black_north.png'
north_equal_area = io.imread(url, as_grey=True)

# check the image
fig = plt.figure(figsize=(20, 10))
ax = fig.add_subplot(1, 1, 1)
ax.set_xticks([])
ax.set_yticks([])
plt.imshow(north_equal_area, cmap = 'gray');

# Do the calculations
r, c = np.shape(north_equal_area)
sz =  r*c
s = np.sum(north_equal_area)
print(np.round(s/sz*100, decimals=2))
>>> 40.44

As suggested in a comment to my initial answer, I run the same Python script for the entire globe and got the expected 30% land coverage:

# import image 
url = 'https://mycartablog.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/peters_projection_black_full.png'
equal_area = io.imread(url1, as_grey=True)

# Do the calculations 
r1, c1= np.shape(equal_area)
sz1 =  r1*c1
s1 = np.sum(equal_area)
print(np.round(s1/sz1*100, decimals=2))
>>> 30.08

 

Computer vision in geoscience: recover seismic data from images – part 1

Posted on by
2

As anticipated in the introductory post of this short series I am going to demonstrate how to automatically detect where a seismic section is located in an image (be it a picture taken from your wall, or a screen capture from a research paper), rectify any distortions that might be present, and remove all sorts of annotations and trivia around and inside the section.

You can download from GitHub all the tools for the automated workflow (including both part 1 and part 2, and some of the optional features outlined in the introduction) in the module mycarta.py, as well as an example Jupyter Notebook showing how to run it.

In this part one I will be focusing on the image preparation and enhancement, and the automatic detection of the seismic section (all done using functions from numpy, scipy, and scikit-image). In order to do that, first I convert the input image  (Figure 1) containing the seismic section to grayscale and then enhance it by increasing the image contrast (Figure 2).

Figure 1 – input image

 

Figure 2 – grayscale image

All it takes to do that is three lines of code as follows:

gry = skimage.color.rgb2gray(img);
p2, p95 = numpy.percentile(gry, (2, 95))
rescale = exposure.rescale_intensity(gry, in_range=(p2, p95))

For a good visual intuition of what actually is happening during the contrast stretching, check my post sketch2model – sketch image enhancements: in there  I show intensity profiles taken across the same image before and after the process.

Finding the seismic section in this image involve four steps:

  1. converting the grayscale image to binary with a threshold (in this example a global threshold with the Otsu method)
  2. finding and retaining only the largest object in the binary image (heuristically assumed to be the seismic section)
  3. filling its holes
  4. applying morphological operations to remove minutiae (tick marks and labels)

Below I list the code, and show the results.

global_thresh = threshold_otsu(rescale)
binary_global = rescale < global_thresh

Figure 3 – binary image

# (i) label all white objects (the ones in the binary image).
# scipy.ndimage.label actually labels 0s (the background) as 0 and then
# every non-connected, nonzero object as 1, 2, ... n.
label_objects, nb_labels = scipy.ndimage.label(binary_global)

# (ii) calculate every labeled object's binary size (including that 
# of the background)
sizes = numpyp.bincount(label_objects.ravel())

# (3) set the size of the background to 0 so that if it happened to be 
# larger than the largest white object it would not matter
sizes[0] = 0

# (4) keep only the largest object
binary_objects = remove_small_objects(binary_global, max(sizes))

Figure 4 – isolated seismic section

# Remove holes (black regions inside white object)
binary_holes = scipy.ndimage.morphology.binary_fill_holes(binary_objects)

Figure 5 – holes removed

enhanced = opening(binary_holes, disk(7))

Figure 6 – removed residual tick marks and labels

That’s it!!!

You can download from GitHub all the tools for the automated workflow (including both part 1 and part 2, and some of the optional features outlined in the introduction) in the module mycarta.py, as well as an example Jupyter Notebook showing how to run it.

In the next post, we will use this polygonal binary object both as a basis to capture the actual coloured seismic section from the input image and to derive a transformation to rectify it to a rectangle.

What is acquisition footprint noise in seismic data?

Posted on by
7

Acquisition footprint is a noise field that appears on 3D seismic amplitude slices or horizons as an interwoven linear crosshatching parallel to the source line and receiver line directions. It is for the most part an expression of inadequate acquisition geometry, resulting in insufficient sampling of the seismic wave field (aliasing) and irregularities in the offset and azimuth distribution, particularly in the cross line direction.

Sometimes source-generated noise and incorrect processing (for example residual NMO due to erroneous velocity picks, incomplete migration, or other systematic errors) can accentuate the footprint.

This noise can interfere with the mapping of stratigraphic features and fault patterns, posing a challenge to seismic interpreters working in both exploration and development settings.

To demonstrate the relevance of the phenomenon I show below a gallery of examples from the literature of severe footprint in land data: an amplitude time slice (Figure 1a) and a vertical section (Figure 1b) from a Saudi Arabian case study, some seismic attributes (Figures 2, 3, 4, and 5), and also some modeled streamer data (Figure 6).

Bannagi combo

Figure 1. Amplitude time slice (top, time = 0.44 s) showing footprint in both inline and crossline direction, and amplitude section (bottom) highlighting the effect in the vertical direction. From Al-Bannagi et al. Copyrighted material.

Penobscop_sobel

Figure 2. Edge detection (Sobel filter) on the Penobscot 3D horizon (average time ~= 0.98 s) displaying N-S footprint. From Hall.

F3_shallow_sobel

Figure 3. Edge detection (Sobel filter) on a shallow horizon (average time ~= 0.44 s)  from the F3 Netherlands 3D survey displaying E-W footprint.

Davogustto and Marfurt

Figure 4. Similarity attribute (top , time = 0.6 s), and most positive curvature (bottom, time = 1.3 s), both showing footprint. From Davogustto and Marfurt. Copyrighted material.

Chopra-Larsen

Figure 5. Amplitude time slice (top, time = 1.32 s) the corresponding  coherence section  (bottom) both showing footprint. From Chopra and Larsen. Copyrighted material.

Long et al

Figure 6. Acquisition footprint in the form of low fold striation due to dip streamer acquisition. From Long et al. Copyrighted material.

In my next post I will review (with more examples form literature) some strategies available to either prevent or minimize the footprint with better acquisition parameters and modeling of the stack response; I will also discuss some ways the footprint can be attenuated after the acquisition of the data (with bin regularization/interpolation, dip-steered median filters, and kx ky filters, from simple low-pass to more sophisticated ones) when the above mentioned strategies are not available, due to time/cost constraint or because the interpreter is working with legacy data.

In subsequent posts I will illustrate a workflow to model synthetic acquisition footprint using Python, and how to automatically remove it in the Fourier domain with frequency filters, and then how to remove it from real data.

References

Al-Bannagi et al. 2005 – Acquisition footprint suppression via the truncated SVD technique: Case studies from Saudi Arabia: The Leading Edge, SEG, 24, 832– 834.

Chopra and Larsen,  2000 – Acquisition Footprint, Its Detection and Removal: CSEG Recorder, 25 (8).

Davogusto and Martfurt, 2011 – Footprint Suppression Applied to Legacy Seismic Data Volumes: 31st Annual GCSSEPM Foundation Bob F Perkins Research Conference 2011.

F3 Netherlands open access 3D:  info on SEG Wiki

Hall, 2014 –  Sobel filtering horizons (open source Jupyter Notebook on GitHub).

Long et al., 2004 – On the issue of strike or dip streamer shooting for 3D multi-streamer acquisition: Exploration Geophysics, 35(2), 105-110.

Penobscot open access 3D:  info on SEG Wiki

Mild or wild: robustness through morphological filtering

Posted on by
Reply

This guest post (first published here) is by Elwyn Galloway, author of Scibbatical on WordPress. It is the forth in our series of collaborative articles about sketch2model, a project from the 2015 Calgary Geoscience Hackathon organized by Agile Geoscience. Happy reading.

 

We’re highlighting a key issue that came up in our project, and describing what how we tackled it. Matteo’s post on Morphological Filtering does a great job of explaining what we implemented in sketch2model. I’ll build on his post to explain the why and how. In case you need a refresher on sketch2model, look back at sketch2model, Sketch Image Enhancement, Linking Edges with Geomorphological Filtering.

Morphological Filtering

As Matteo demonstrated by example, sketch2model’s ability to segment a sketch properly depends on the fidelity of a sketch.

fill_before_after_closing

An image of a whiteboard sketch (left) divides an area into three sections. Without morphological filtering, sketch2model segments the original image into two sections (identified as orange, purple) (centre). The algorithm correctly segments the area into three sections (orange, purple, green) when morphological filtering is applied (right).

To compensate for sketch imperfections, Matteo suggested morphological filtering on binarized images. Morphological filtering is a set of image modification tools which modify the shape of elements in an image. He suggested using the closing tool for our purposes. Have a look at Matteo’s Post for insight into this and other morphological filters.

One of the best aspects of this approach is that it is simple to apply. There is essentially one parameter to define: a structuring element. Since you’ve already read Matteo’s post, you recall his onion analogy explaining the morphological filtering processes of erosion and dilation – erosion is akin to removing an onion layer, dilation is adding a layer on. You’ll also recall that the size of the structuring element is the thickness of the layer added to, or removed from, the onion. Essentially, the parameterization of this process comes down to choosing the thickness of the onion layers.

Sketch2model uses dilation followed by erosion to fill gaps left between sketch lines (morphological dilation followed by erosion is closing). Matteo created this really great widget to illustrate closing using an interactive animation.

closing_demo1

Matteo’s animation was created using this interactive Jupyter notebook. Closing connects the lines of the sketch.

Some is Good, More is Better?

Matteo showed that closing fails if the structural element used is too small. So just make it really big, right? Well, there can be too much of a good thing. Compare what happens when you use an appropriately sized structuring element (mild) to the results from an excessively large structuring element (wild).

over-morph filtering.png

Comparing the results of mild and wild structuring elements: if the structuring element is too large, the filter compromises the quality of the reproduction.

Using a morphological filter with a structural element that is too small doesn’t fix the sketches, but using a structural element that is too large compromises the sketch too. We’re left to find an element that’s just right. Since one of the priorities for sketch2model was to robustly handle a variety of sketches with as little user input as possible — marker on whiteboard, pencil on paper, ink on napkin — we were motivated to find a way to do this without requiring the user to select the size of the structuring element.

Is there a universal solution? Consider this: a sketch captured in two images, each with their own resolution. In one image, the lines of the sketch appear to be approximately 16 pixels wide. The same lines appear to be 32 pixels wide in the other image. Since the size of the structuring element is defined in terms of pixels, it becomes apparent the ideal structuring element cannot be “one size fits all”.

res_vs_res

High-resolution (left) versus low-resolution (right) image of the same portion of a sketch. Closing the gap between the lines would require a different size structuring element for each image: about 5 pixels for high-resolution or 1 pixel for low-resolution.

Thinking Like a Human

Still motivated to avoid user parameterization for the structuring element, we explored ways to make the algorithm intelligent enough to select an appropriate structuring element on its own. Ultimately, we had to realize a few things before we came up with something that would work:

  1. When capturing an image of a sketch, users compose very similar images (compose in the photographic sense of the word): sketch is centered and nearly fills the captured image.
  2. The image of a sketch is not the same as a user’s perception of a sketch: a camera may record imperfections (gaps) in a sketch that a user does not perceive.
  3. The insignificance of camera resolution: a sketched feature in captured at two different resolutions would have two different lengths (in pixels), but identical lengths when defined as a percentage of image size.

With these insights, we deduced that the gaps we were trying to fill with morphological filtering would be those that escaped the notice of the sketch artist.

Recognizing the importance of accurate sketch reproduction, our solution applies the smallest structuring element possible that will still fill any unintentional gaps in a sketch. It does so in a way that is adaptable.

A discussion about the definition of “unintentional gap” allowed us to create a mandate for the closing portion of our algorithm. Sketch2model should fill gaps the user doesn’t notice. The detail below the limit of the user’s perception should not affect the output model. A quick “literature” (i.e. Google) search revealed that a person’s visual perception is affected by many factors beyond the eye’s optic limits. Without a simple formula to define a limit, we did what any hacker would do… define it empirically. Use a bunch of test images to tweak the structuring element of the closing filter to leave the perceptible gaps and fill in the imperceptible ones. In the sketch2model algorithm, the size of structuring element is defined as a fraction of the image size, so it was the fraction that we tuned empirically.

Producing Usable Results

Implicit in the implementation is sketch2model’s expectation that the user’s sketch, and their image of the sketch are crafted with some care. The expectations are reasonable: connect lines you’d like connected; get a clear image of your sketch. Like so much else in life, better input gives better results.

paper_pen_wow2_beforeafter.jpg

Input (left) and result (right) of sketch2model.

To produce an adaptable algorithm requiring as little user input as possible, the sketch2model team had to mix a little image processing wizardry with some non-technical insight.

Have you tried it? You can find it at sketch2model.com. Also on GitHub.

Previous posts in the sketch2model series: sketch2model, Sketch Image Enhancement, Linking Edges with Geomorphological Filtering.

sketch2model – linking edges with mathematical morphology

Posted on by
3

Introduction

As written by Elwyn in the first post of this series, sketch2model was conceived at the 2015 Calgary Geoscience Hackathon as a web and mobile app that would turn an image of geological sketch into a geological model, and then use Agile Geoscience’s modelr.io to create a synthetic seismic model.

original project promo image

The skech2model concept: modelling at the speed of imagination. Take a sketch (a), turn it into an earth model (b), create a forward seismic model (c). Our hack takes you from a to b.

One of the main tasks in sketch2model is to identify each and every geological body in a sketch  as a closed polygon. As Elwyn wrote, “if the sketch were reproduced exactly as imagined, a segmentation function would do a good job. The trouble is that the sketch captured is rarely the same as the one intended – an artist may accidentally leave small gaps between sketch lines, or the sketch medium can cause unintentional effects (for example, whiteboard markers can erase a little when sketch lines cross, see example below). We applied some morphological filtering to compensate for the sketch imperfections.

Morphological filtering can compensate for imperfections in a sketch, as demonstrated in this example. The original sketch (left) was done with a marker on white board. Notice how the vertical stroke erased a small part of the horizontal one. The binarized version of the sketch (middle) shows an unintentional gap between the strokes, but morphological filtering successfully closes the small gap (right).

Morphological filtering can compensate for imperfections in a sketch, as demonstrated in this example. The original sketch (left) was done with a marker on white board. Notice how the vertical stroke erased a small part of the horizontal one. The binarized version of the sketch (middle) shows an unintentional gap between the strokes, but morphological filtering successfully closes the small gap (right).

The cartoon below shows what would be the final output of sketch2model in the two cases in the example above (non closed and closed gap).

fill_before_after_closing

My objective with this post is to explain visually how we correct for some of these imperfections within sketch2model. I will focus on the use of morphological closing,  which consist in applying in sequence a dilation and an erosion, the two fundamental morphological operations.

Quick mathematical morphology review

All morphological operations result from the interaction of an image with a structuring element (a kernel) smaller than the image and typically in the shape of a square, disk, or diamond. In most cases the image is binary, that is pixels take either value of 1, for the foreground objects, or 0 for the background. The structuring element operates on the foreground objects.

Morphological erosion is used to remove pixels on the foreground objects’ boundaries. How ‘deeply’ the boundaries are eroded depends on the size of the structuring element (and shape, but in this discussion I will ignore the effect of changing the shape). This operation is in my mind analogous to peeling off a layer from an onion; the thickness of the layer is related to the structuring element size.

Twan Maintz in his book Digital and medical image processing describes the interaction of image and structuring element during erosion this way: place the structuring element anywhere in the image: if it is fully contained in the foreground object (or in one of the objects) then the origin (central) pixel of the structuring element (and only that one) is part of the eroded output. The book has a great example on page 129.

Dilation does the opposite of erosion: it expands the object boundaries (adding pixels) by an amount that is again related to the size of the structuring element. This is analogous to me to adding back a layer to the onion.

Again, thanks to Maintz the interaction of image and structuring element in dilation can be intuitively described: place the structuring element anywhere in the image: does it touch any of the foreground objects? If yes then the origin of the structuring element is part of the dilated result. Great example on pages 127-128.

Closing is then for me akin to adding a layer to an onion (dilation) and then peeling it back off (erosion) but with the major caveat that some of the changes produced by the dilation are irreversible: background holes smaller than the structuring element that are filled by the dilation are not restored by the erosion. Similarly, lines in the input image separated by an amount of pixels smaller than the size of the structuring element are linked by the dilation and not disconnected by the erosion, which is exactly what we wanted for sketch2model.

Closing demo

If you still need further explanation on these morphological operations, I’d recommend reading further on the ImageMagik user guide the sections on erosion, dilation, and closing, and the examples  on the Scikit-image website.

As discussed in the previous section, when applying closing to a binary image, the external points in any object in the input image will be left unchanged in the output, but holes will be filled, partially or completely, and disconnected objects like edges (or lines in sketches) can become connected.

We will now demonstrate it below with Python-made graphics but without code; however,  you can grab the Jupyter notebook with complete Python code on GitHub.

I will use this model binary image containing two 1-pixel wide lines. Think of them as lines in a sketch that should have been connected, but are not.

We will attempt to connect these lines using morphological closing with a disk-shaped structuring element of size 2. The result is plotted in the binary image below, showing that closing was successful.

But what would have happened with a smaller structuring element, or with a larger one? In the case of a disk of size 1, the closing magic did not happen:

Observing this result, one would increase the size of the structuring element. However, as Elwyn will show in the next post, also too big a structuring element would have detrimental effects, causing subsequent operations to introduce significant artifacts in the final results. This has broader implications for our sketch2model app: how do we select automatically (i.e. without hard coding it into the program) the appropriate structuring element size? Again, Elwyn will answer that question; in the last section I want to concentrate on explaining how the closing machinery works in this case.

In the next figure I have broken down the closing operation into its component dilation and erosion, and plotted them step by step to show what happens:

non_closed_break_red_two

So we see that the edges do get linked by the dilation, but by only one pixel, which the following erosion then removes.

And now let’s break down the closing with disk of size two into its component. This is equivalent to applying two consecutive passes of dilation with disk of size 1, and then two consecutive passes of erosion with disk of size 1, as in the demonstration in the next figure below (by the way, if we observed carefully the second panel above we could predict that the dilation with a disk of size two would result in a link 3-pixel wide instead of 1-pixel wide, which the subsequent erosion will not disconnect).

closed_break_red

Below is a GIF animated version of this demo, cycling to the above steps; you can also run it yourself by downloading and running the Jupyter notebook on GitHub.

closing_demo

Additional resources

Closing Jupyter notebook with complete Python code on GitHub

sketch2model Jupyter notebook with complete Python code on GitHub 

More reading on Closing, with examples

Related Posts

sketch2model (2015 Geoscience Hackathon, Calgary)

sketch2model – sketch image enhancements

Mapping and validating geophysical lineaments with Python

sketch2model – sketch image enhancements

Posted on by
7

This is the second post of in a series of collaborative articles about sketch2model, a project from the 2015 Calgary Geoscience Hackathon organized by Agile Geoscience.

The first post was written by Elwyn Galloway and published on both his Scibbatical blog and here on MyCarta. In that article Elwyn mentioned the need for an adaptive image conditioning workflow for binarization of photos with geological sketches in images. Binarization is the process of converting a natural image to a binary image (check this simple but awesome interactive demonstration of binarization), which in our case is necessary to separate the sketch from the background.

The following is a demonstration of the preliminary image processing operations applied to the input photo when sketch2model is run. The full code listing of this demonstration is available as a Jupyter notebook on GitHub. Also in GitHub you can find a Jupyter Notebook with the fully documented version of sketch2model.

First we import one of the photos with sketches and convert it to a grayscale image.

im = io.imread('paper_breaks.png')
im = color.rgb2gray(im[0:-1:2,0:-1:2])

paper_breaks_post

Next we enhance the grayscale image with a couple of cascaded processes. But before we do that, let’s graph the intensity values across the image to understand the degree of contrast between sketch edges and background, which ultimately will determine our success in separating them from it. We show this in the figure below, on the left, for one column of pixels (y direction). The black line across the input image on the right shows the location of the column selected. It is fairly obvious from the plot on the left that the intensity of the background is not uniform, due to variable light conditions when the photo was taken, and towards the right (e.g. bottom of the photo) it gets closer to that of the edges. In some images it might even become less than the intensity of the edge. This highlights the need for (preemptively) applying the enhancements illustrated in the remainder of the post.

section_raw

The first enhancement is called compressor, or limiter. I read many years ago that it is used in electronics to find hard edges in data: the idea is to square each element in the data (image, or other type of data), smooth the result (enough to remove high frequency variations but not so much as to eliminate variability), take the square root, and finally divide each element in the input by the square root result.

I experimented with this method (at the time using Matlab and its Image Processing Toolbox) using the same gravity dataset from my 2015 geophysical tutorial on The Leading Edge (see the post Mapping and validating geophysical lineaments with Python). An example of one such experiments is shown in the figure below where: the top left map is the Bouguer data; the centre top map is the squared data; the top right is the result of a Gaussian blur; the bottom left the result of square root, and centre right is the final output, where the hardest edges in the original data have been enhanced.

Sketch2model_compressor_campi

The most important parameter in this process is the choice of the smoothing or blur; using a Gaussian kernel of different size more subtle edges are enhanced, as seen in the bottom right map (these are perhaps acquisition-related gridding artifacts).

In our sketch2model implementation the size of the Gaussian kernel is hardcoded; it was chosen following trial and error on multiple photos of sketches and yielded optimal results in the greatest majority of them. We were planning to have the kernel size depend on the size of the input image, but left the implementation to our ‘future work’ list.’

Here’s the compressor code from sketch2model:

# compressor or limiter (electronics): find hard edges in data with long 
# wavelength variations in amplitude
# step 1: square each element in the image to obtain the power function
sqr = im**2
# step 2: gaussian of squared image
flt2 = sp.ndimage.filters.gaussian_filter(sqr,21)
# step 3: divide the intensity of each original pixel by the square root 
# of the smoothed square
cmprs= im/(np.sqrt(flt2))

and a plot of the result (same column of pixels as in the previous one):

section_compressed

From the plot above we see that now the background intensity is uniform and the contrast has been improved. We can maximize it with contrast stretching, as below:

# contrast stretching
p2, p98 = np.percentile(cmprs, (2, 98))
rescale = exposure.rescale_intensity(cmprs, in_range=(p2, p98))

section_stretched

We now have ideal contrast between edges and background, and can get a binary image with the desired sketch edges using a scalar threshold:

# binarize image with scalar threshold
binary = ~(color.rgb2gray(rescale) > 0.5)

section_binary

Bingo!

Mapping and validating geophysical lineaments with Python

Posted on by
4

In Visualization tips for geoscientists: MATLAB, Part III I showed there’s a qualitative correlation between occurrences of antimony mineralization in the southern Tuscany mining district and the distance from lineaments derived from the total horizontal derivative (also called maximum horizontal gradient).

Let’s take a look at the it below (distance from lineaments increases as the color goes from blue to green, yellow, and then red).

regio_distance_mineral_occurrences

However, in a different map in the same post I showed that lineaments derived using the maxima of the hyperbolic tilt angle (Cooper and Cowan, 2006, Enhancing potential field data using filters based on the local phase) are offset systematically from those derived using the total horizontal derivative.

Let’s take a look at the it below: in this case Bouguer gravity values increase as the color goes from blue to green, yellow, and then red; white polygons are basement outcrops.

The lineaments from the total horizontal derivative are in black, those from the maxima of hyperbolic tilt angle are in gray. Which lineaments should be used?

The ideal way to map the location of density contrast edges (as a proxy for geological contacts) would be  to gravity forward models, or even 3D gravity inversion, ideally constrained by all available independent data sources (magnetic or induced-polarization profiles, exploratory drilling data, reflection seismic interpretations, and so on).

The next best approach is to map edges using a number of independent gravity data enhancements, and then only use those that collocate.

Cooper and Cowan (same 2006 paper) demonstrate that no single-edge detector method is a perfect geologic-contact mapper. Citing Pilkington and Keating (2004, Contact mapping from gridded magnetic data – A comparison of techniques) they conclude that the best approach is to use “collocated solutions from different methods providing increased confidence in the reliability of a given contact location”.

I show an example of such a workflow in the image below. In the first column from the left is a map of the residual Bouguer gravity from a smaller area of interest in the southern Tuscany mining district (where measurements were made on a denser station grid). In the second column from the left are the lineaments extracted using three different (and independent) derivative-based data enhancements followed by skeletonization. The same lineaments are superimposed on the original data in the third column from the left. Finally, in the last column, the lineaments are combined into a single collocation map to increase confidence in the edge locations (I applied a mask so as to display edges only where at least two methods collocate).

collocation_teaser

If you want to learn more about this method, please read my note in the Geophysical tutorial column of The Leading Edge, which is available with open access here.
To run the open source Python code, download the iPython/Jupyter Notebook from GitHub.

With this notebook you will be able to:

1) create a full suite of derivative-based enhanced gravity maps;

2) extract and refine lineaments to map edges;

3) create a collocation map.

These technique can be easily adapted to collocate lineaments derived from seismic data, with which the same derivative-based enhancements are showing promising results (Russell and Ribordy, 2014, New edge detection methods for seismic interpretation.)

Reinventing the color wheel – part 2

Posted on by
Reply

In the first post of this series I argued that we should not build colormaps for azimuth (or phase) data by interpolating linearly between fully saturated hues in RGB or HSL space.

A first step towards the ideal colormap for azimuth data would be to interpolate between isoluminant colours instead. Kindlmann et al. (2002) published isoluminant RGB values for red, yellow, green, cyan, blue, and magenta based on a user study. The code in the next block show how to interpolate between those published colours to get 256-sample R, G, and B arrays (with magenta repeated at both ends), which can then be combined into a isoluminant colormap for azimuth data.

01 r = np.array([0.718, 0.847, 0.527, 0.000, 0.000, 0.316, 0.718])
02 g = np.array([0.000, 0.057, 0.527, 0.592, 0.559, 0.316, 0.000])
03 b = np.array([0.718, 0.057, 0.000, 0.000, 0.559, 0.991, 0.718])
04 x = np.linspace(0,256,7)
05 xnew = np.arange(256)
06 r256 = np.interp(xnew, x, r)
07 g256 = np.interp(xnew, x, g)
08 b256 = np.interp(xnew, x, b)

This is a good example in general of how to interpolate to a finer sampling one or more sequence of values using the interp function from the Numpy library. In line 04 we define 7 evenly spaced points between 0 and 255; this will be the sample coordinate for the r, g, and b colours created in lines 01-03. In line 05 we create the new coordinates we will be interpolating r, g, and b values at in lines 06-08 (all integers between 0 and 256). The full code will come in the Notebook accompanying the last post in this series.

This new colormap is used in the bottom map of the figure below, whereas in the top map we used a conventional HSV azimuth colormap (both maps show the dip azimuth calculated on the Penobscot horizon). The differences are subtle, but with the isoluminant colormap we are guaranteed there are no perceptual artifacts due to the random variations in lightness of the fully saturated HSV colors.

Azimuth_compare

Another possible strategy to create a perceptual colormap for azimuth data would be to set lightness and chroma to constant values in LCH space and interpolate between hues. This is the Matlab colormap I previously created, and shown in Figure 4 of New Matlab isoluminant colormap for azimuth data. In the next post, I will show how to do this in Python.

Read more on colors and seismic data

The last two posts on Agile show you how to corender seismic amplitude and continuity from a time slice using a 2D colormap,  and then how to corender 3 attributes from a horizon slice.

Reference

Kindlmann, E. et al. (2002). Face-based Luminance Matching for Perceptual Colour map Generation – Proceedings of the IEEE conference on Visualization.