URTeC: 2886325

Feature Detection for Digital Images Using Machine Learning Algorithms and
Image Processing
Xiao Tian*, Hugh Daigle, Han Jiang
Hildebrand Department of Petroleum and Geosystems Engineering, University of Texas at
Austin, Austin, Texas, USA
Copyright 2018, Unconventional Resources Technology Conference (URTeC) DOI 10.15530/urtec-2018-2886325

This paper was prepared for presentation at the Unconventional Resources Technology Conference held in Houston, Texas, USA, 23-25 July 2018.

The URTeC Technical Program Committee accepted this presentation on the basis of information contained in an abstract submitted by the author(s). The contents of this paper have not been
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Abstract
Microfractures are important mechanical discontinuities in shales and are important for fluid flow during production.
Understanding their properties is crucial for accurate shale production prediction and implementing effective
stimulation strategies. Scanning electron microscope (SEM) images are useful for characterizing shale
microstructure, but manual image analysis is often challenging and time consuming. We present an alternative
method for quickly characterizing microfractures and obtaining pore structure information from SEM images using
machine learning algorithms and image processing. Using this approach, SEM images were obtained from deformed
and intact samples of a carbonate rich shale and a siliceous shale with the goal of identifying microfractures. Support
vector machine, convolutional neural networks, and four pretrained convolutional neural networks were
implemented to differentiate SEM images containing fractures (frac-images) and SEM images containing no
fractures (non-frac-images). Images containing fractures were identified with 92% training accuracy and 88%
testing accuracy. A pretrained convolutional neural network with 16 layers (vgg16) was shown to perform best for
this image classification task.
Introduction
Microfractures in shales are believed to constitute a key fluid transport network, serving as primary hydrocarbon
transport pathways from the shale matrix to the induced hydraulic fractures (Kim and Moridis, 2014; Carey et al.,
2015). A comprehensive understanding of microfractures is important for accurate shale reservoir modeling and
production estimates. However, fracture characterization is difficult due to the extremely small fracture scale and the
wide distribution of fracture scales in shale rocks. Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) has been widely used to
characterize pore systems in mudrocks qualitatively, focusing on the distribution of organic micropores and pore
connectivity (Loucks et al., 2009; Milliken et al., 2013). However, considering the multiscale properties of shale
formations and the small size of microfractures, a large number of images is required to comprehensively understand
microfractures in shales. Quantitative analysis of large numbers of SEM images can be a difficult and time-
consuming task. Fortunately, thanks to increasing computational power and improved algorithms, machine learning ,
and especially deep learning, is capable of automated pattern recognition from huge amounts of data.
Many researchers have applied artificial neural networks and support vector machines (SVM) to digital images for
shale lithofacies prediction (Wang et al., 2013; Wang et al., 2014, Zhao et al., 2014). Mohapatra (2016) compared
the performance of five machine learning algorithms (multilayer perceptron (MLP), radial basis functional neural
network (RBFN), probabilistic neural network (PNN), k-nearest neighbor (KNN), and SVM) to classify coal quality
in one of three categories (best, good, poor) using SEM images. They concluded that SVM gave the highest
performance accuracy for coal quality characterization. In another application, Palafox et al. (2017) developed
MarsNet, a program based on ConvNets, to detect different geological landforms on Mars. This previous work
motivates our use of SVM and ConvNets, as their recent application in geological image analysis problems has
yielded good results. Until now, most research applied to micro-image analysis has focused on lithofacies analysis
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and few efforts have been devoted to microfracture analysis (Lary et al., 2016).
This project utilized the most advanced image analysis machine learning algorithms to automatically select images
which contain fractures from SEM images and compared the performance of these algorithms, with the goal of
improving accuracy and reducing processing time of digital image analysis. A brief description of the machine
learning theories is first presented. Then, the methodology of machine learning models for image classification is
illustrated. Finally, the results of different machine learning algorithms are analyzed, and the algorithms are
evaluated regarding their performance for the fracture image classification task.
Theory
SVM combined with histogram of oriented gradients (HOG)
SVM works by converting samples (i.e., SEM images) into points in feature space, where samples of different
classes (i.e., fractured or not fractured) can be separated on opposite sides of an optimal hyperplane (Palafox et al.,
2017) (Fig. 1(a)). SVM can perform both linear and nonlinear classifications using a set of mathematical functions
that transforms raw data to required forms for better feature extraction. These functions are called kernel functions
(Hastie et al., 2009) (Fig. 1 (b)). In this paper, the histogram of oriented gradients (HOG) image feature descriptor is
combined with SVM for better feature extraction. The scheme for HOG is illustrated in Fig. 2. In HOG detection,
the images are broken down into connected regions called blocks (for example 24×24 pixels per block). Each block
is divided into sub-cells. Spatial gradients of pixel values are computed for each pixel in the cells. Each cell is
discretized into angular bins based on the gradient orientation. Lastly, histograms of the gradients in each block are
computed and serve as feature descriptor. For more details regarding SVM_HOG, refer to Palafox et al. (2017).

Figure 1.(a) Optimal hyperplane illustration of SVM. The optimal hyperplane (solid line in the middle) has the
maximum margin of separation between the two groups. The circled data points are the support vectors, which are
the nearest points to the hyperplane in each group. The area dedicated by the green arrow is the maximum margin
between two groups. SVM determines the optimal hyperplane and the support vectors during model training and
uses them to distinguish different groups during model application.

Figure 1(b). SVM nonlinear classification. Φ represents the kernel function which transform the raw input data x to
φ(x). In this case, the data points are not linearly separable in 2D but are linearly separable when projected into 3D
space through the kernel function Φ. In our application, each point would represent an image, and the different
colors would correspond either to the presence or absence of fractures.
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Figure 2. scheme for HOG computation

Convolutional neural networks (ConvNets)
ConvNets are composed of multilayer neurons with learnable weights and biases. Neurons are mathematical models
where weights, biases and non-linear functions are applied to input data (images plus labels) for feature extraction.
Random weights and biases are generated at the beginning of computation. The values of weights and biases are
optimized during model training and the optimized values can be used for prediction. There are three main kinds of
structure in ConvNets: convolutional layers, pooling layers, and fully-connected layers (Fig. 3). Convolutional
layers take filters with different sizes and slide them over the complete SEM image. The dot products between the
values in the filter and the pixel values of the input SEM images are calculated . The results are passed to pooling
layers for dimensionality reduction, where some results are dropped randomly. In the end, fully-connected layers are
used to perform image classification based on the results from pooling layers. Each layer is connected to another
through a differentiable function. Softmax is one of the most widely used differentiable functions. The expression
for softmax function is given in equation 1. In classification tasks, the softmax function calculates the probability (P)
for the jth class (in our case, frac-images or non-frac images) given input vector x (in our case, processed image
pixel values) and weighting vector w, which is learned by the model. xTw is the inner product of input vector x and
weights w:

. Eq.1
There are many tricks in ConvNets including shared weights, down-sampling, and translation invariance that enable
them to classify images efficiently. ConvNets are especially good at image processing tasks by preserving spatial
information and reducing model parameters through weight sharing between the neurons. The ConvNets can be built
from scratch or be pretrained on large image datasets. The architecture of ConvNets built from scratch is illustrated
in Fig. 4. Weight layers are where weights get trained and updated. Since pooling layers only perform dimension
reduction on weights without training the weights, pooling layers are not counted as weight layers. There are 8
weight layers, including 6 convolutional layers and 2 fully-connected layers. The pretrained ConvNets are
introduced in next section. More details regarding ConvNets can be found referring to LeCun et al. (2015).

Figure 3. Convolutional neural networks architecture

Pretrained ConvNets
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Sometimes, it is difficult to gather a dataset which is sufficiently representative of the real world. In addition,
training ConvNets from scratch can be tedious and time consuming. To solve these problems, transfer learning
algorithms are developed. In transfer learning, ConvNets with different architectures are trained on a huge dataset
(e.g., ImageNet, contains 1.2 million images with 1000 categories: http://www.image-net.org/). Once these
ConvNets models are tuned and the optimal structure and model parameters are obtained. These models can be
implemented as a fixed feature extractor to solve new problems (Razavian et al, 2014). In this paper, we evaluated
the performance of 4 pre-trained ConvNets models (vgg16, vgg19, xception, inceptionv3 :
https://github.com/ritaxiaotian/Flower_pretrain) for SEM image classification. The pre-trained models run much
faster than ConvNets which are trained from scratch and often give more accurate prediction results (Zeiler &
Fergus, 2014).
The architecture for vgg16 model, vgg19 model and for the ConvNets trained from scratch are described in Fig. 4
(Simonyan & Zisserman, 2014). Multiple 3x3 convolutional layers are adopted in vgg networks to represent
complex features. As the depth of vgg network increases (more convolutional layers), a massive number of
parameters are generated, and learning power is increased greatly. There are 16 weight layers in vgg16 model,
including 13 convolutional layers and 3 fully-connected layers. There are 19 weight layers in vgg19 model,
including 16 convolutional layers and 3 fully-connected layers.
The architecture for inceptionv3 model (Szegedy et al., 2016) is described in Fig. 5. In inceptionv3, a special
inception module is adopted to improve model performance. In the inception module, convolutional layers with
different filter sizes are computed in parallel and the resulting features are concatenated before passed to the next
layer. The increase in features greatly increase the learning power of the model (Szegedy et al., 2016). The
architecture for Xception model (Chollet, 2016) is illustrated in figure 6. Xception improves on the inception model
with a simple and more elegant architecture. 36 stages of convolutions are implemented in Xception models,
including 34 separable convolutional layers. In separable convolutions, a spatial convolution is implemented
keeping the channels separate, then a depthwise convolution is performed. For more details regarding separable
convolutions, refer to Jin et al. (2014).

Figure 4. Architecture for vgg16, vgg19, and ConvNets trained from scratch.
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Figure 5. Architecture for Inceptionv3 ConvNets model. In the inception modules, convolutional layers with
different filter sizes are computed in parallel and the results are concatenated before being passed to the next layer.

Figure 6. Architecture for the Xception ConvNets model.

Machine learning model evaluation
In this paper, a confusion matrix is used to evaluate the performance of classifiers. In a confusion matrix, the
columns represent predicted labels from the algorithm and the rows represent true labels. Table 1 shows the
confusion matrix for a binary classification problem and Fig. 7 shows a confusion matrix for a multiclass
classification problem.
Table1. Confusion Matrix
Predicted Class
Actual Class Class = Yes Class = No
Class = Yes True Positive (tp) False Negative (fn)
Class = No False Positive (fp) True Negative (tn)
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Figure 7. Example confusion matrix for image classification. There are 2 types of labels: fracture and non-fracture.
The numbers in the blocks are sample numbers fall into each category. The numbers are made up to illustrate the
concept of confusion matrix.
Three commonly used evaluation metrics, which are precision, recall and accuracy, for classification models are also
computed for these algorithms. These metrics are defined in Eqs. 1-3 using variables defined in Table 1:
Precision =tp/(tp+fp), Eq. 1
Recall = tp/(tp + fn), Eq. 2
Accuracy= tp+tn/(tp +tn+fp+ fn). Eq. 3
Method
In an image classification task, the SEM image dataset is randomly divided into three groups: training dataset,
validation dataset, and test dataset. The training dataset is used for learning, in which the parameters/weights of
machine learning models are fit to satisfy the training dataset distribution. The validation dataset is used for model
tuning, in which model parameters are adjusted to minimize overfitting. The test dataset is used to evaluate the
actual predictive/generalization power of machine learning models (Hastie et al., 2009; Witten and Frank, 2005).
There are four main steps in applying machine learning models for image classification. First, SEM images are
collected. Second, data pre-processing is implemented to clean, correct, and transform the SEM image into a
representative set of inputs (e.g. grayscale values for each pixel). Certain techniques (e.g., principal component
analysis or color thresholding) can be used in this step for dimension reduction and extraction of those features most
relevant to the problem. Third, model training is performed where the model parameters (weights and model
architectures) are trained and tuned using the training and validation datasets. Model evaluation is also implemented
in this step. The model is applied to the test dataset and appropriate evaluation metrics and are applied to prediction
results (Guyon, 2008; Hastie et al., 2009). Lastly, the model can be used for image classification tasks. A flowchart
for the workflow used in this project is given in Fig. 8.

Figure 8. Workflow for image classification using machine learning models.

Image collection
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In this paper, we analyzed 100 SEM images from preserved samples of Eagle Ford shale from a well in Karnes
County, Texas, and a siliceous shale from the northern Rocky Mountains, USA. The samples were experimentally
deformed in confined compressive strength tests to compare the microstructure between deformed and undeformed
samples (Daigle et al., 2017a,b). The dataset contains 76 Eagle Ford images (54 from undeformed samples and 22
from deformed samples) and 24 siliceous shale images (16 from undeformed samples and 8 from deformed
samples). The horizontal field width (HFW) of the images ranges from 4.9 μm to 914 μm and the resolution for the
images ranges from 0.2 pixel/nm to 0.001 pixel/nm. Since a large portion of pores in the shale matrix are nano-scale
(diameter < 50 nm) pores, the resolution of the SEM images is too low for those pores to be observed. Therefore, the
value of the image resolution should be combined with fracture detection results to calculate the size of fractures.
The average horizontal field width for SEM images is 128 μm and the average resolution is 0.008 pixel/nm.
Image preprocessing
In this step, image areal porosity was obtained from clustering and filtering grayscale image pixel values. The cutoff
pixel values (e.g. 80) for pores were determined for each SEM image with the assumption that pores are darker than
their surroundings. Note that this pore detection criterion may result in some false positives and false negatives; that
is, some pores may not be identified, while some areas of solid matrix may be incorrectly identified as pores. We
assume that the incidence of these errors is roughly the same, so their effects cancel out. Points with pixel grayscale
values smaller than the cutoff are marked and pore size information is obtained by counting the number of marked
pixels. Then, we selected around 100 overview SEM images and sliced these images into around 1600 smaller sub-
images for better image processing (Fig. 9). Third, we manually labeled the 1600 images into frac-images and non-
frac-images based on visual inspection for the presence of fractures. After this step, we obtained 300 images which
had fractures in them (which are labeled as 1), 1147 images which had no fractures in them (which are labeled as 0),
and 153 images which were damaged by scratches; these images are referred to as “noisy” (Fig. 10).
Since the sample size for frac-images is small compared to other image classification applications in the literature
(e.g. ImageNet contains 1.3 million high-resolution images with 1000 categories (Krizhevsky et al, 2012)), we
randomly set aside 100 images as a test dataset (46 with fractures and 54 without fractures) and then rotated the
remaining 254 frac-images three times (90 degrees clockwise, 90 degrees counterclockwise, and then 180 degrees)
to generate more synthetic frac-images (Fig. 11). By rotating these images, more information regarding pixel
orientations can be provided to machine learning algorithms. In the end, we obtained 1016 frac-images and 1143
non-frac-images for the training and validation dataset. These 2159 images were randomly split into training dataset
(70% of dataset) and test dataset (30% of dataset) to train and tune the machine learning models. We used the 100
unrotated SEM images as the test dataset. A flowchart for image preprocessing is exhibited in Fig. 12.

Figure 9. Example of image cropping and slicing.

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a. (b) (c)
Figure 10. (a) Noisy image with ion milling artifacts; (b) image containing no fractures; (c) image containing
fractures.

(a) (b) (c) (d)

Figure 11. (a) Original image, (b) rotated 180°, (c) rotated 90° clockwise, (d) rotated 90° counterclockwise.

Figure 12. Workflow for SEM image preprocessing.

Model training
The preprocessed SEM image information is passed to machine learning models. The machine learning models are
trained and tuned on training dataset and validation dataset. Once the parameters of the model are optimized, the
model can be used for image classification tasks. The workflow of using SVM_HOG for image classification is
exhibited in Fig. 13. The workflow using ConvNets (both the pretrained ConvNets and ConvNets built from scratch)
for image classification is shown in Fig. 14.
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Figure 13. SVM_HOG image classification flow chart. Figure 14. CNN image classification flow chart.
Results
Porosity information from pixel clustering and filtering
The areal porosity information for each image can be obtained by a pixel clustering and filtering algorithm (Fig. 15).
After applying pixel clustering and filtering, we obtained the areal porosity for all SEM images. The average areal
porosity for 100 SEM images is around 2.3%.

a. (b)
Figure 15. (a) Original SEM image. (b) SEM image after pixel clustering and filtering.
A summary of average porosity for the SEM images is presented in Table 2. We can see that for most samples, there
is slight increase in average areal porosity for the cracked samples. The difference between the total porosity values
and the image porosity is because the average resolution of the images is 0.008 pixel/nm, which is not high enough
for pores smaller than 125 nm in diameter to be detected.
Table 2. Summary of average image areal porosity from pixel clustering. Total porosity values for each sample
determined by nuclear magnetic resonance measurements (Daigle et al., 2017a) are shown for comparison.

Sil 3-14 EF 2-50 Sil 3-42 EF 11354 EF 2-93 MEAN

Intact images porosity 0.90% 2.00% 0.20% 1.26% 3.10% 2.12%

Failed images porosity 0.46% 2.18% 0.86% 1.40% 3.96% 2.65%

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Total porosity 7.1% 7.3% 9.7% 6.2% 7.7% n/a

Image classification results

For the SVM_HOG classifier, the confusion matrix for the validation and test dataset is presented in Fig. 16. The
precision, recall and accuracy for the validation dataset (633 images) are 0.84, 0.83 and 0.84. The precision and
recall for the test dataset (100 images) are 0.85, 0.84 and 0.84.

(a) (b)
Figure 16. (a) Confusion matrix for SVM_HOG validation dataset. (b) Confusion matrix for SVM_HOG test
dataset.
For ConvNets models built from scratch, the confusion matrix for the validation dataset (633 images) and the test
dataset (100 images) are presented in Fig. 17. The precision, recall and accuracy for validation dataset are 0.91, 0.90
and 0.91. The precision and recall for test dataset are 0.86, 0.86 and 0.86.

Figure 17. (a) Confusion matrix for ConvNets validation dataset. (b) Confusion matrix for ConvNets test dataset.
For the pretrained ConvNets, the performance of 4 different pretrained models are evaluated (vgg16, vgg19,
inception_v3, and xception). For each model, 3 different classifiers (random forest (RF), support vector machine
(SVM), and logistic regression (LR)) are tested as the last layer of these models for image classification. The
accuracy of the combination of these 4 pretrained models with these 3 classifiers are listed in Table 3.
From Table 3, it can be concluded that vgg19 combined with linear regression generates the highest accuracy. For
this combination, the confusion matrix for the validation (633 images) and test (100 images) dataset are presented in
Fig. 19. For this combination, the precision, recall and accuracy for the validation dataset are 0.92, 0.92 and 0.92.
The precision, recall and accuracy for the test dataset are 0.88, 0.88 and 0.88. The precision, recall and accuracy for
SVM_HOG, ConvNets, pretrained ConvNets for validation dataset and test dataset are summarized in Table 4.
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Figure 18. (a) Confusion matrix for pretrained model validation dataset. (b) Confusion matrix for pretrained model
test dataset.

Table 3. Summary of image classification performance from different models.

Classifiers Accuracy

Pretrained_vgg19 LR 0.92

RF 0.90

SVM 0.90

Pretrained_vgg16 LR 0.91

RF 0.90

SVM 0.90

LR 0.88
Pretrained_inception_
RF 0.88
v3
SVM 0.89

Pretrained_xception LR 0.90

RF 0.86

SVM 0.89
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Table 4. Summary of image classification results.

validation dataset test dataset

precision recall accuracy precision recall accuracy

SVM_HOG 0.84 0.83 0.84 0.85 0.84 0.84

ConvNets 0.91 0.90 0.91 0.86 0.86 0.86
Pretrained_vgg19 0.92 0.92 0.92 0.88 0.88 0.88

Discussion
We compared the performance of three machine learning algorithms which are most widely used for image
classification: SVM_HOG, ConvNets and pre-trained ConvNets. The performance metrics compare the machine
learning results with manual interpretations. The pretrained ConvNets have the highest validation score. The
generalization ability or robustness of a machine learning model is reflected by the model’s performance on the test
dataset. Table 4 shows that the pretrained ConvNets is more robust compared to the other two models.
Fig. 19 (a) shows the shape of ideal learning curves for supervised machine learning problems. The score values
may differ for different tasks, but the trend should be similar. Fig. 19 (b) are the learning curves obtained for
pretrained models in image classification. As the size of the training dataset increases, the training score decreases,
and the cross-validation score increases, which means that a larger dataset allows fractures to be detected in the
training and validation datasets at a more similar rate. However, in the end, these is still relatively large gap between
the training score and validation score, indicating that fractures are still not being detected as well in the validation
dataset, presumably because the training dataset is not fully representative. The learning curves show that obtaining
more SEM images will help to increase model prediction accuracy and reliability.

(a) (b)
Figure 19. (a) Ideal form of learning curves (b) Learning curve for fracture image classification.
Conclusions and future work
Machine learning is a promising method for feature detection in digital images. Once the ConvNets are properly
trained with manually labeled images, they can be used to automatically analyze other digital images. The pretrained
ConvNets can classify images quickly and accurately. These algorithms can be used for quick quantitative and
qualitative analysis for vast amounts of images. In this study, we focused on fracture identification, but the
techniques could presumably be extended to characterization of other properties, such as mineralogy, pore
morphology, and pore size distribution. In future work, the object detection algorithms will be implemented to detect
the location, shape and size of fractures and other minerals. As a result, the spatial relationship between fractures
and other minerals can be obtained by looking at the location and size of bounding boxes.
Acknowledgments
This work was supported by the Research Partnership to Secure Energy for America under subcontract 12122-52.
We thank Nick Hayman, Eric Kelly, Kitty Milliken, and Patrick Smith for acquiring the images.
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