Data augmentation for 3D seismic fault interpretation using deep learning

Manual seismic interpretation of faults is a tedious and complicated process, which is prone to human error and bias. A semi-automatic approach for interpreting faults on seismic data is to use attributes that highlight discontinuities. These methods need to be optimized by the interpreter, thus constantly rely on the interpreter's knowledge. Recently, Machine Learning (ML) techniques in general and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) as part of Deep Neural Networks (DNN), in particular, have been used to detect and image faults on seismic data in order to make the process more automated and accurate. Supervised CNN learns and evolves from manually annotated or labeled fault interpretations. In this study, we have applied supervised 2D CNN to image faults on seismic data through binary segmentation. The study was performed on 3D marine seismic surveys in off-shore Norway collected from three separate locations along the Norwegian Continental Shelf, utilizing Efficient UNET CNN architecture. We applied data augmentation (geometric transformations) and hyperparameter tuning to improve the learning process and performance of the deep learning algorithm. We used noise content, acquisition type, imaging type, and fault scale as the main criteria to select seismic surveys. The application of data augmentation to the training and testing data generally led to improvement in the performance of 2D CNN on fault predictions, although the amount of improvement varied with respect to different surveys. The initial 2D CNN fault prediction improvement mainly relied on the quality, and size of faults present in the 3D seismic volumes. Further, improvement was achieved by the adjustment of certain hyperparameters affecting the training and testing process of the 2D CNN. However, we found little to no improvement on one seismic volume containing high levels of noise. •Pretrained deep learning models are used to accelerate the time-consuming process of fault picking on seismic data.•The role of data augmentation, training and model parameters on the quality of the predicted faults on different datasets was investigated.•Data augmentation is helpful in almost all cases expect where the noise content is high.•With regards to training and model parameters, increasing the patch size has a positive impact on the quality of the predictions for large faults.•Increasing drop out from certain threshold (above 0.3 in our study) gives poorer predictions of faults.