Image Statistic Models Characterize Well Log Image Quality

Abstract

Assessing the image quality of well logs is essential to ensure the accuracy of their digitization and subsequent processing. Currently, the suitability of well logs for information retrieval is solely determined on the basis of subjective judgments of their image quality by human experts. The success of natural scene statistics (NSS)-based models that are used to conduct no-reference (NR) quality assessment of photographic images motivates us to try to exploit them to characterize the quality of nonphotographic images, such as well logs. Accordingly, we develop a scheme to characterize the quality of a well log as “acceptable” or “unacceptable” for subsequent processing based on the natural image quality evaluator (NIQE), a successful NR image quality assessment model based on the NSS. Our experimental results show that the objective quality scores thus obtained can be reliably used to eliminate well logs of inferior quality from the processing pipeline, which can serve as a beneficial step to reduce the human hours spent in examining well logs and to improve the rate of information retrieval as well as the accuracy of retrieved information. Source code for the trained well log image quality predictor is available at https://github.com/Somdyuti2/Well_log_IQA.