Classifying lithofacies from textural features in whole core CT-scan images

X-ray computerized tomography (CT) is a nondestructive method of providing information about the internal composition and structure of whole core reservoir samples. In this study we propose a method to classify lithology. The novelty of this method is that it uses statistical and textural information extracted from whole core CT images in a supervised learning environment. In the proposed approaches, first-order statistical features and textural grey-level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM) features are extracted from whole core CT images. Here, two workflows are considered. In the first workflow, the extracted features are used to train a support vector machine (SVM) to classify lithofacies. In the second workflow, a principal component analysis (PCA) step is added before training with two purposes: first, to eliminate collinearity among the features and second, to investigate the amount of information needed to differentiate the analyzed images. Before extracting the statistical features, the images are preprocessed and decomposed using Haar mother wavelet decomposition schemes to enhance the texture and to acquire a set of detail images that are then used to compute the statistical features. The training data set includes lithological information obtained from core description. The approach is validated using the trained SVM and hybrid (PCA þ SVM) classifiers to predict lithofacies in a set of unseen data. The obtained results show that the SVM classifier can predict some of the lithofacies with high accuracy (up to 91% recall), but it misclassifies, to some extent, similar lithofacies with similar grain size, texture, and transport properties. The SVM classifier captures the heterogeneity in the whole core CT images more accurately compared with the core description, indicating that the CT images provide additional high-resolution information not observed by manual core description. Further, the obtained prediction results add information on the similarity of the lithofacies classes. The prediction results using the hybrid classifier are worse than the SVM classifier, indicating that low-power components may contain information that is required to differentiate among various lithofacies.