SoilScanner: 3D Visualization for Soil Profiling using Portable X-ray Fluorescence

Abstract

Soil scientists perform similar types of exploratory analysis repeatedly, such as generating the spatial distribution of chemical elements. The soil analysis process is time-consuming (may take days or weeks), labor-intensive (involving many people with different expertise for data collection, measurements, visual representation, and data analysis), and involving various tools (from traditional software, such as Microsoft Excel, to some complicated packages such as ArcGIS and MatLab). Inspired by medical scanning, this paper proposes a 3D visual solution, which can be generated via a web interface, allowing Soil scientists to perform on-the-field analysis. Our visualization prototype, named SoilScanner, supports a full range of interactive operations, such as ranking, filtering, brushing and linking, and detail on demand. We also demonstrated the usability of our SoilScanner visualizations on the soil profiles in West Texas, USA, collected via portable X-ray fluorescence spectrometers.