Zhen Wang

Yuting Hu, Zhen Wang, Ghassan AlRegib

In this paper, we present an efficient and distinctive local descriptor, namely block intensity and gradient difference (BIGD). In an image patch, we randomly sample multi-scale block pairs and utilize the intensity and gradient differences of pairwise blocks to construct the local BIGD descriptor. The random sampling strategy and the multi-scale framework help BIGD descriptors capture the distinctive patterns of patches at different orientations and spatial granularity levels. We use vectors of locally aggregated descriptors (VLAD) or improved Fisher vector (IFV) to encode local BIGD descriptors into a full image descriptor, which is then fed into a linear support vector machine (SVM) classifier for texture classification. We compare the proposed descriptor with typical and state-of-the-art ones by evaluating their classification performance on five public texture data sets including Brodatz, CUReT, KTH-TIPS, and KTH-TIPS-2a and -2b. Experimental results show that the proposed BIGD descriptor with stronger discriminative power yields 0.12% ~ 6.43% higher classification accuracy than the state-of-the-art texture descriptor, dense microblock difference (DMD).

G. AlRegib, M. Deriche, Z. Long et al.

Understanding Earth's subsurface structures has been and continues to be an essential component of various applications such as environmental monitoring, carbon sequestration, and oil and gas exploration. By viewing the seismic volumes that are generated through the processing of recorded seismic traces, researchers were able to learn from applying advanced image processing and computer vision algorithms to effectively analyze and understand Earth's subsurface structures. In this paper, first, we summarize the recent advances in this direction that relied heavily on the fields of image processing and computer vision. Second, we discuss the challenges in seismic interpretation and provide insights and some directions to address such challenges using emerging machine learning algorithms.

Zhiling Long, Yazeed Alaudah, Muhammad Ali Qureshi et al.

In this paper, we explore how to computationally characterize subsurface geological structures presented in seismic volumes using texture attributes. For this purpose, we conduct a comparative study of typical texture attributes presented in the image processing literature. We focus on spatial attributes in this study and examine them in a new application for seismic interpretation, i.e., seismic volume labeling. For this application, a data volume is automatically segmented into various structures, each assigned with its corresponding label. If the labels are assigned with reasonable accuracy, such volume labeling will help initiate an interpretation process in a more effective manner. Our investigation proves the feasibility of accomplishing this task using texture attributes. Through the study, we also identify advantages and disadvantages associated with each attribute.