# DSCope: Development of Automatic Program for Detecting Fractures and Measuring Dip Angles
## 5 Conclusions  
Analysis of the drilling cores obtained from drilling investigations is essential for determining the rock conditions and geotechnical properties of the target area. Previously, however, expensive televiewer or 3D laser systems were required to conduct quantitative and precise analyses. In addition, methods for finding the discontinuities of drilling cores and roughly estimating the dip angles with visual analysis were used. For such a visual analysis, a drilling core is cut to a certain depth (e.g., 1 m), placed in a box and then photographed. Analyzing photographs with the naked eye is a general method that has wide applications. However, the results obtained using this method may vary significantly because of the differences in the ways different researchers analyze photographs. To address this, we developed a program in Python to automatically identify discontinuities and measure the dip angles of the identified discontinuities by analyzing existing photographs of drilling cores without the use of expensive systems. The program automatically performs analysis under the condition that the settings (e.g., number of cores, \(\sigma\), threshold, scanbox and trimming) are in the text file, which can be modified by a user for analyzing drilling core photographs. Furthermore, the same criteria can be applied to multiple photographs collectively, and it only takes approximately 10 s to analyze a single photograph. Therefore, several photographs can be analyzed at a much faster rate than \begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{c c c c c} \hline \hline \multirow{2}{*}{**Absolute Value of the Angle**} & \multicolumn{3}{c}{**The Number of Detected Fractures**} \\ \cline{2-5}  & \multicolumn{1}{c}{**Naked Eye**} & \multicolumn{1}{c}{**DSCope**} \\ \hline Low angle & 118 & (51\%) & 101 & (73\%) \\ Middle angle & 50 & (21\%) & 32 & (23\%) \\ High angle & 65 & (28\%) & 5 & (4\%) \\ Total & 233 & (100\%) & 138 & (100\%) \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table} 
Table 1: Comparison between the number of fractures detected by the naked eye and DSCope. in conventional visual analysis. Furthermore, the program is numerically more precise, accurate and objective than visual analysis. To verify the applicability of the program to actual field data, it was applied to the drilling cores in the granite area of the Mesozoic Jurassic Period, and the results were compared with those of visual analysis. Based on the comparison results, the program automatically recognized 83% of the discontinuities that were confirmed with the naked eye. In particular, the results for the low angles reproduced approximately 86% of the visual analysis results. Notably, a distinct feature of our program is that discontinuities that are not automatically identified can be added to the results using GUIs, which were separately developed. To be precise, three additional GUIs were developed: one GUI for finding the appropriate value for batch application by immediately reflecting the settings, one GUI for splitting the core box photographs, including the drilling cores, into each drilling core photograph and one GUI for checking and selecting the results (see Figure 12). These GUIs were used to overcome the shortcomings of batch analysis. In conclusion, the program developed in this study can provide more reliable information than visual analysis for drilling cores and help determine the characteristics of an  
Figure 12: Examples of the second and third GUIs. The left panel shows that the second GUI displays the results as different parameters (e.g., Canny \(\sigma\), scanbox size, threshold and trimming ratio) immediately. Then, saving only the selected output about each core is possible. Meanwhile, the right panel shows that the third GUI is helpful after obtaining the results through the last stage’s code. The third GUI helps to save the correct output by checking the box. area more precisely and accurately. Furthermore, it does not require the use of expensive new systems, and existing drilling cores can be reanalyzed using only photographs.