Most of the world's oil reserves and natural gas are stored within carbonate rock's pores and fractures. Pores and fractures are quite popular for predicting the amount of petroleum under an adequate trap condition. Hence, their petrophysical properties, such as shape and size, are paramount for accurately predicting the reservoir's state and condition. Current modelling techniques are mostly based on manual and expert judgement which are time-consuming and cost-intensive. In this study, we devised a robust and scalable image processing framework that uses the combination of pixel-based clustering approach with a polar coordinate feature transformation technique to intelligently identify the pores of carbonate rock samples. We reported that such a method can be effective in detecting pores of different shapes and sizes in an automated fashion. We rigorously tested the proposed method on the computed tomography-scanned micro-images of a carbonate rock sample, and the results demonstrate improved identification accuracy of the proposed method than the current deep learning counterparts. Another key advantage compared to deep learning methods, the proposed method does not require extensive training on data, which saves time and effort without being computationally too expensive. © 2013 IEEE.