Automatic borehole fracture detection and characterization with tailored Faster R-CNN and simplified Hough transform

Understanding the geological information of fractures from borehole images is essential for conducting a thorough geological analysis in engineering. Recently, the convolutional neural network (CNN) has been employed to extract high-level features of fractures from images. We propose an improved Faster R-CNN (region-based CNN) model for fracture detection, which is suitably equipped with a tailored region proposal network f-RPN for borehole fractures. The anchors generated by f-RPN are specifically designed with a fixed width and varying heights, and only the anchors with the maximum intersection-over-union values are labeled as positive. By taking advantage of the cyclic feature of borehole images, the images are expanded in four orientations to increase the amount and diversity of the model input. The detection results of the model can further be utilized to simplify the Hough transform for characterizing dip angles and dip directions of fractures. The proposed method is validated with borehole images from multiple projects in hydraulic engineering. Experiments reveal that the average detection accuracy is approximately 91.5%, which exhibits an improvement of 11.06% compared to the original Faster R-CNN. Further analysis indicates that both f-RPN and the multi-orientation expansion contribute to improving the prediction accuracy. It is also shown that this method demonstrates robustness against blurred image background and outperforms traditional image processing methods in the presence of noise. The fracture characterization by the simplified Hough transform turns out to be computationally efficient and accurate, with the absolute errors less than 5° compared to the manual identification results. •Faster R-CNN is improved with a tailored f-RPN for borehole fracture detection.•Borehole images are expanded in multiple orientations for data augmentation.•Simplified Hough transform based on Faster R-CNN results to characterize fractures.•The method is robust with blurred and noisy image data from real hydraulic engineering.