Touchstone

Many of our users are collecting data for Touchstone from Geocosm.   We hope you are already aware of the time-savings available from  using PETROG’s ability to create Touchstone-ready data.

With the release of Touchstone 8 we are ensuring that all existing data collected for Touchstone 7 will be usable in Touchstone 8 without further work, and that new fetaures in Touchstone 8 are supported by PETROG.

We are currently talking to key users about populating ‘overgrowths’ data in Touchstone. We would be pleased to investigate any other ways of making it easier to use Touchstone.

Data entry methods

PETROG revolutionised petrographic data entry and management and the methods introduced are still the best available but we know we can do better.

We developed the PETROG virtual keyboard (PVK) to assist in faster, more accurate and customisable data entry.

We are continuing to refine the data entry and would welcome any feedback and suggestions.

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Grain Size

In conjunction with the Image Analysis unit at the University of North Wales, Bangor, we have developed automatic sizing and recognition of grains from slide images. This unfortunately does not operate on thin sections but only on sieved samples.

It is currently undergoing trials in two separate areas: kerogens and rare earth minerals. We would be pleased to discuss other trials if you have an application which you think might benefit from this technique and would be pleased to hear from you if you are working with either kerogens (looking at, for example, automatic determination of equant/lath ratios, or automatic determination of relative kerogen composition,    or any other analyses that could benefit from automation) or rare earth minerals.

Porosity determination

As part of PETROG's data capture process, porosity is identified. We have developed algorithms for using these data sets, together with the images captured at each point on a thin section, to provide a better    estimate of the percentage porosity on the whole slide.               

This process is undergoing evaluation by geologists. We would be pleased to hear from anyone with an interest in helping to evaluate this technique as well as anyone with an interest in extending the technique to samples stained for other purposes, especially clays.          

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