Soil pore segmentation of computed tomography images based on fully convolutional network

In this paper, a soil pore segmentation method based on fully convolutional network (FCN) is proposed to improve the accuracy of pore segmentation in soil image and provide technical support for the research of soil science. Taking the soil of typical black soil as the research object, the soil computed tomography image were obtained by scanning and cutting. Based on the FCN network, the soil image and the calibrated image of pore structure were input for convoluting, pooling and deconvoluting operations, and the error between the prediction image and the calibration image was used as feedback to complete the forward inference operation. Then, the weight value was updated by the back propagation algorithm to establish the soil pore segmentation model. Fully considering the pore geometry and spatial distribution characteristics, the pore model can accurately output the soil pore binary image. Meanwhile, the commonly used segmentation methods in the literature, such as Otsu method, watershed method, regional growth method and Fuzzy C-means method (FCM) were adopted for the comparative experiments on soil computed tomography images with low pore density (0-0.03), medium pore density (0.03-0.1) and high pore density (0.1-1) which were defined by porosity of soil. The experimental results showed that the watershed method and the regional growth method overestimate the pore structure of different geometries, including cracks between the pores, whereas the Otsu method and FCM method tended to overestimate the macropores and underestimate the micropores. Compared the five methods, the FCN method can accurately extract the pore structures with vary topologies from the complex soil computed tomography images with low, medium and high pore density. Moreover, the segmentation accuracy rate, over-segmentation rate, and under-segmentation rate were used to evaluate the soil pore segmentation performance of five methods. Based on 1487 soil computed tomography images, the average segmentation accuracy of FCN pore segmentation method was 98.1%, which was 25.6%, 48.3%, 55.7% and 9.5% higher than that of Otsu method, watershed method, regional growth method and FCM method. The average over-segmentation rate of the FCN pore segmentation method was 2.2%, which was only 33.8% of the suboptimal method (FCM method), respectively. And the average under-segmentation rate of the FCN pore segmentation method was 1.3%, which was only 23.6% of the suboptimal method (FCM method). In total, the FCN method can accurately extract the pore topology, restore the spatial distribution of pores and its application can make up for the shortcoming that the traditional segmentation method only uses the low-level features (gray and edge) when extracting the pore structure. Owing to the multiple convolution layers in the network, the FCN method can obtain the vary features of pore structure, so it has strong generalization ability and robustness of pore segmentation for different types of soil images. This paper will has a good reference for the microscopic process simulation, 3D reconstruction and soil structure analysis on the pore scale, and can provide a more intelligent technical method for soil science. © 2019, Editorial Department of the Transactions of the Chinese Society of Agricultural Engineering. All right reserved.