Rendering Semisynthetic FIB-SEM Images of Rock Samples

Abstract

Digital rock analysis is a prospective approach to estimate properties of oil and gas reservoirs. This concept implies constructing a 3D digital twin of a rock sample. Focused Ion Beam - Scanning Electron Microscope (FIB-SEM) allows to obtain a 3D image of a sample at nanoscale. One of the main specific features of FIB-SEM images in case of porous media is pore-back (or shine-through) effect. Since pores are transparent, their back side is visible in the current slice, whereas, in fact, it locates in the following ones. A precise segmentation of pores is a challenging problem. Absence of annotated ground truth complicates fine-tuning the algorithms for processing of FIB-SEM data and prevents successful application of machine- learning-based methods, which require a huge training set. Recently, several synthetic FIB- SEM images based on stochastic structures were created. However, those images strongly differ from images of real samples. We propose fast approaches to render semisynthetic FIB- SEM images, which imply that intensities of voxels of mineral matrix in a milling plane, as well as geometry of pore space, are borrowed from an image of rock sample saturated by epoxy. Intensities of voxels in pores depend on the distance from milling plane to the given voxel along a ray directed at an angle equal to the angle between FIB and SEM columns. The proposed method allows to create very realistic FIB-SEM images of rock samples with precise ground truth. Also, it opens the door for numerical estimation of plenty of algorithms for processing FIB-SEM data.