Patent ID: 11867008
Assignee: SAUDI ARABIAN OIL COMPANY
Field: Audio-visual technology (Electrical engineering)
Classification: CPC E  G  H | IPC E  G  H

Claim 0:
1. A method for monitoring the flow of drilling mud from a wellbore, comprising:
capturing, using a digital imaging device, images of drilling mud at a surface of the wellbore as the drilling mud flows through one or more image capture zones of a circulation system that circulates drilling mud through the wellbore and a wellbore drilling assembly;
receiving, by one or more processors of a computer system operatively coupled to the digital imaging device, the images captured by the digital imaging device; and
processing, by the one or more processors, the images captured by the digital imaging device to determine a rate of flow of the drilling mud through the one or more image capture zones, wherein processing the images comprises:
deploying a machine learning model to extract abstract features from the images captured by the digital imaging device, wherein the machine learning model comprises a convolutional neural network (CNN) model, and
determining the rate of flow of the drilling mud through the one or more image capture zones by processing, using the CNN, the abstract features and additional features that comprise one or more of drilling parameters of the wellbore drilling assembly, properties of the drilling mud, and the weight of drilling mud measured in the one or more image capture zones using one or more mass sensors.