Deep learning in denoising of micro-computed tomography images of rock samples

Nowadays, the advantages of Digital Rock Physics (DRP) are well known and widely applied in comprehensive core analysis. It is also known that the quality of the 3D pore scale model drastically influences the results of rock properties simulation, which makes the preprocessing stage of DRP very important. In this work, we consider the application of Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) for the preprocessing of CT images, specifically for denoising, in two setups - conventional fully-supervised learning and the self-supervised learning, when the only available data is the noisy images. To train CNNs in a supervised setup, we use images processed by a combination of bilateral and bandpass filters. We trained CNNs of the same architecture with different loss functions to find out how the choice of a loss function influences the model's performance. Some of the obtained CNNs yielded the highest quality in terms of full-reference and no-reference metrics and significant histogram effect (bimodal intensity distribution). Images denoised with these models were qualitatively and quantitatively better than the reference “ground truth” images used for training. We use the Deep Image Prior algorithm to train denoising models in a self-supervised setup. The obtained models are much better than ones obtained in fully-supervised setup, but are too slow, as they are optimization-based rather than feed-forward. Such an algorithm can be used in the dataset generation for feed-forward meta-models. These results could help to develop an AI-based instrument to build high-quality 3D segmented models of rocks for DRP applications.