Descripción automática de secciones delgadas de rocas: una aplicación Web

The identification and characterization of various rock types is one of the fundamental activities for geology and related areas such as mining, petroleum, environment, industry and construction. Traditionally, a human specialist is responsible for analyzing and explaining details about the type, composition, texture, shape and other properties using rock samples collected in-situ or prepared in a laboratory. The results become subjective based on experience, in addition to consuming a large investment of time and effort. The present proposal uses artificial intelligence techniques combining computer vision and natural language processing to generate a textual and verbal description from a thin section image of rock. We build a dataset of images and their respective textual descriptions for the training of a model that associates the relevant features of the image extracted by EfficientNetB7 with the textual description generated by a Transformer network, reaching an accuracy value of 0.892 and a BLEU value of 0.71. This model can be a useful resource for research, professional and academic work, so it has been deployed through a Web application for public use.