Introducing INPOX: a method for informed point extraction from geological 2D surfaces exemplified on the Danish national hydrostratigraphic model

Abstract

This study presents a probabilistic method for extracting informed points from geological surfaces, named INPOX. The method generates a probability map from the existing surface by calculating the Laplacian at each location and combining it with a user-defined transfer function. A set of points from the surface is then extracted with a density proportional to the probability map. The method allows a de-coupling of the most informative points in the surface from points carrying less or even biased information. INPOX can be applied on any geological surface where the user needs to retrieve the structurally relevant parts and remove the information created by the initial interpolation. Here, we test INPOX on synthetic data, with and without supressing interpolation artifacts. In both cases, the informed points extracted with INPOX outperforms a uniform probability map in recreating the original features. We show that the method requires a minimum of points to be extracted for INPOX to be more informative than a uniform point retrieval. Finally, to showcase the strength of the method in both retrieving the relevant geological features and suppressing the existing interpolation artifacts, we apply INPOX to a real case surface from the Danish national hydrostratigraphic model.

Keywords

• inpox
• laplacian
• decoupling information
• interpolation artifacts
• 3d layer models
• artifact suppression