Deep Learning Application for Fracture Segmentation Over Outcrop Images from UAV-Based Digital Photogrammetry

Fractures affect the intrinsic properties of permeability and porosity of reservoir geobodies, making its network characterization an important task for fluid flow modeling. Direct acquisition of data on reservoirs is labor-intensive and generally produces sparse information. Thus, the study of analogue outcrops with similar characteristics is often carried out by using unmanned aerial vehicle image acquisition and digital photogrammetry. However, the accurate automatic recognition of the fractures network over the outcrop images remains a challenge. Image segmentation methods based on convolution neural networks (CNNs) were successfully applied in medicine, biology, and other areas, however, not yet in geological fracture detection. This work proposes the validation of two popular CNNs - Segnet and Unet - for pixel-to-pixel segmentation targeting fracture detection. Initial results showed acceptable scores of the metrics mean intersection over union (mIoU) and dice intersection (F1) in both CNNs.