On 3D reconstruction of porous media by using spatial correlation functions

Abstract

The challenging process of 3D porous media reconstruction from a single 2D image is investigated in this paper. The reconstruction of the 3D model is based on the statistical information derived from a 2D thin image of the material, by applying a spatial correlation function. For the first time, this paper reviews the commonly used auto-correlation functions for material characterization and discusses their properties making them useful for 3D porous media reconstruction. A set of experiments is conducted in order to analyze the reconstruction capabilities of the studied correlation functions, while some useful conclusions are drawn. Finally, by taking into account the reconstruction performance of the existed correlation functions, some desirable properties that need to be satisfied by an ideal correlation function towards the improvement of the reconstruction accuracy are determined.