Fault-Guided Seismic Stratigraphy Interpretation via Semi-Supervised Learning

Delineating seismic stratigraphic features and depositional facies is of importance to successful reservoir mapping and identification in the subsurface. Robust seismic stratigraphy interpretation is confronted with two major challenges. The first one is to maximally automate the process particularly with the increasing size of seismic data and complexity of target stratigraphies, while the second challenge is to efficiently incorporate available structures into stratigraphy model building. Machine learning, particularly convolutional neural network (CNN), has been introduced into assisting seismic stratigraphy interpretation through supervised learning. However, the small amount of available expert labels greatly restricts the performance of such supervised CNN. Moreover, most of the exiting CNN implementations are based on only amplitude, which fails to use necessary structural information such as faults for constraining the machine learning. To resolve both challenges, this paper presents a semi-supervised learning workflow for fault-guided seismic stratigraphy interpretation, which consists of two components. The first component is seismic feature engineering (SFE), which aims at learning the provided seismic and fault data through a unsupervised convolutional autoencoder (CAE), while the second one is stratigraphy model building (SMB), which aims at building an optimal mapping function between the features extracted from the SFE CAE and the target stratigraphic labels provided by an experienced interpreter through a supervised CNN. Both components are connected by embedding the encoder of the SFE CAE into the SMB CNN, which forces the SMB learning based on these features commonly existing in the entire study area instead of those only at the limited training data; correspondingly, the risk of overfitting is greatly eliminated. More innovatively, the fault constraint is introduced by customizing the SMB CNN of two output branches, with one to match the target stratigraphies and the other to reconstruct the input fault, so that the fault continues contributing to the process of SMB learning. The performance of such fault-guided seismic stratigraphy interpretation is validated by an application to a real seismic dataset, and the machine prediction not only matches the manual interpretation accurately but also clearly illustrates the depositional process in the study area.