Patent ID: 7236887

Claim:
A method for detecting planar events from an image using a Hough transform technique comprising the steps of: a. Storing a borehole image into a computer based system; said computer based system performing the following tasks: b. Invite a human user to specify an upper and a bottom reference curve that border the pattern corresponding to a series of essentially co-planar events to delimit a subset of the 3D Hough accumulator array corresponding to the whole borehole image, said reference curves being used to define a range of reference planar event parameters and a depth interval; c. Computing the accumulator matrix for said subset; d. Computing a 1D average trace representing the extrema of the subset of the Hough transform accumulator for each depth; e. Searching in the 1D average trace the extrema beyond a given threshold; f. For each extremum in the 1D average trace, getting the horizontal coordinates of the point of the 3D Hough accumulator corresponding to this extremum at depth Zi, said horizontal coordinates representing one planar event to detect; and g. Detecting the planar events from the image from all the planar events detected from step (f); h. Storing the detected planar events from the image in the computer based system for retrieval by the human user.