Nonlinear Processes in Geophysics (Nov 2008)
Influence of thresholding in mass and entropy dimension of 3-D soil images
Abstract
With the advent of modern non-destructive tomography techniques, there have been many attempts to analyze 3-D pore space features mainly concentrating on soil structure. This analysis opens a challenging opportunity to develop techniques for quantifying and describe pore space properties, one of them being fractal analysis. <br><br> Undisturbed soil samples were collected from four horizons of Brazilian soil and 3-D images at 45 μm resolution. Four different threshold criteria were used to transform computed tomography (CT) grey-scale imagery into binary imagery (pore/solid) to estimate their mass fractal dimension (<I>D<sub>m</sub></I>) and entropy dimension (<I>D</I><sub>1</sub>). Each threshold criteria had a direct influence on the porosity obtained, varying from 8 to 24% in one of the samples, and on the fractal dimensions. Linear scaling was observed over all the cube sizes, however depending on the range of cube sizes used in the analysis, <I>D<sub>m</sub></I> could vary from 3.00 to 2.20, realizing that the threshold influenced mainly the scaling in the smallest cubes (length of size from 1 to 16 voxels). <br><br> <I>D<sub>m</sub></I> and <I>D</I><sub>1</sub> showed a logarithmic relation with the apparent porosity in the image, however, the increase of both values respect to porosity defined a characteristic feature for each horizon that can be related to soil texture and depth.
