Automatic Framework for Extraction and Characterization of Wetting Front Propagation Using Tomographic Image Sequences of Water Infiltrated Soils

This paper presents a new automatic framework for extracting and characterizing the dynamic shape of the 3D wetting front and its propagation, based in a sequence of tomographic images acquired as water (moisture) infiltrates in unsaturated soils. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, the shape of the 3D wetting front and its propagation and progress over time has not been previously produced as a whole by methods in existing literature. The proposed automatic framework is composed two important and integrated modules: i) extraction of the 3D wetting front, and ii) characterization and description of the 3D wetting front to obtain important information about infiltration process. The 3D wetting front surface is segmented from 3D CT imagery provided as input via a 3D stochastic region merging strategy using quadric-regressed bilateral space-scale representations. Based on the 3D segmentation results, the normal directions at local curvature maxima of the wetting front surface are computed for 3D images of soil moisture, and its propagation is analyzed at the local directions in sites of maximal water adsorption, and described using histograms of curvature changes over time in response to sample saturation. These curvature change descriptors provide indirect measurements of moisture infiltration in soils, and soil saturation. Results using a field tomograph equipment specific for soil studies are encouraging, and suggest that the proposed automatic framework can be applied to estimate the infiltration of water in soils in 3D and in time.