Computer Graphics Procedural Modeling of Tabular Soil Morphology Data.

Soil scientists in the US have created a large national database of written soil profile descriptions that follow a well-defined set of rules for describing soil morphological properties. However, interpreting these descriptions is a skill that requires considerable practice and experience. Moreover, even with this experience writing a description is straightforward, but recreating a visual representation of a soil from a written description is a difficult task. Nowadays, there is no generalized approach for taking soil profile descriptions and translating them into recognizable visual representations. We propose a novel procedural modeling approach inspired by procedural models commonly used in the field of computer graphics. Our framework takes tabular soil morphological data (i.e., soil profile descriptions) as a textual input and translates them into visual features based on parametric models. Those models are represented as soil profile in either a two dimensions as plain images or as three-dimensional interactive models that allow rotation, scaling, and other forms of visual explorations. The procedural modeling technique enables the user to generate the soil profile visual representation with a small data overhead. The images do not need to be stored, because they are generated as necessary at arbitrary resolution. The goal of our work is to allow a user to click or touch a particular spot on a digital soil map and thereby obtain a realistic image of the soil profile at that location, in essence allowing the user to dig a virtual soil pit.