Deep Learning Convolutional Neural Networks to Predict Porous Media Properties

Digital rocks obtained from high-resolution micro-computed tomography (micro-CT) imaging has quickly emerged as a powerful tool for studying pore-scale transport phenomena in petroleum engineering. In such frameworks, digital rock analysis usually carries the problematic aspect of segmenting greyscale images into different phases for quantifying many physical properties. Fine pore structures, such as small rock fissures, are usually lost during segmentation. In addition, user bias in this process can lead to significantly different results. An alternative approach based on deep learning is proposed. Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) are utilized to rapidly predict several porous media properties from 2D greyscale micro-computed tomography images in a supervised learning frame. A dataset of greyscale micro-CT images of three different sandstones species is prepared for this study. The image dataset is segmented, and pore networks are extracted to compute porosity, coordination number, and average pore size for training and validating our model predictions. The greyscale images (input) and the computed properties (output) are uploaded to a deep neural network for training and validation in an end-to-end regression scheme. Overall, our model estimates porosity, coordination number, and average pore size with an average error of 0.05, 0.17, and 1.8μm, respectively. Training wall-time and prediction error analysis are also discussed. This is a first step to use artificial intelligence and machine learning methods for the robust prediction of porous media properties from unprocessed image-driven data.