Automatic generation of geological stories from a single sketch

Describing the history of a terrain from a vertical geological cross-section is an important problem in geology, called geological restoration. Designing the sequential evolution of the geometry is usually done manually, involving many trials and errors. In this work, we recast this problem as a storyboarding problem, where the different stages in the restoration are automatically generated as storyboard panels and displayed as geological stories. Our system allows geologists to interactively explore multiple scenarios by selecting plausible geological event sequences and backward simulating them at interactive rate, causing the terrain layers to be progressively un-deposited, un-eroded, un-compacted, un-folded and un-faulted. Storyboard sketches are generated along the way. When a restoration is complete, the storyboard panels can be used for automatically generating a forward animation of the terrain history, enabling quick visualization and validation of hypotheses. As a proof-of-concept, we describe how our system was used by geologists to restore and animate cross-sections in real examples at various spatial and temporal scales and with different levels of complexity, including the Chartreuse region in the French Alps.