DXSoil, a library for 3D image analysis in soil science

A comprehensive series of routines has been developed to extract structural and topological information from 3D images of porous media. The main application aims at feeding a pore network approach to simulate unsaturated hydraulic properties from soil core images. Beyond the application example, the successive algorithms presented in the paper allow, from any 3D object image, the extraction of the object skeleton, the measurement of the distribution of local apertures and the partition of the object into a set of interconnected subobjects according to different size classes. The resulting, specific library DXSoil is available under the OpenDX environment more generally dedicated to data exploration and visualization.