Development of an automated laboratory core specimen photography system

This paper documents the development of an automated core photography system named GeoTable. The system consists of a manual rotating stage retrofitted with stepper motor controlled by a microcontroller and specialized software. The specialized software controls both the rotating stage and a DSLR camera. Using the specialized software, a user is able input the number of pictures to be taken of the specimen surface. The number of pictures determines the number of degrees the stage must rotated between photographs. After the imaging sequence is completed, the pictures are imported into Matlab® for image processing. The images are automatically cropped to remove the green screen background, expanded to a flat surface, cropped for a second time to remove the most distorted portions of the images, and finally stitched together to form a single undistorted image of the specimen surface. The undistorted image can then be imported into any image analysis software for further study. Image analysis modules are currently being developed so that analysis can be automatically conducted once the final image is produced.