Structural Augmentation in Seismic Data for Fault Prediction

Abstract

Fault interpretation tasks become more and more difficult as the complexity of seismic exploration increases, especially for ultra-deep seismic data. Recently, numerous researchers have utilized automatic interpretation techniques based on deep learning to improve the efficiency and accuracy of fault prediction. Although deep learning methods have powerful data information processing capabilities, the applicability of deep neural networks may still be limited by the range of learned information. Therefore, we develop a new technique called structural data augmentation to enhance the diversity of the datasets. Concretely, we utilize different geological structure theories to incorporate virtual folds and faults in the field seismic data to improve the diversity and generalization ability of the training datasets. To cope with the multi-stage and multi-scale complex structures developed in ultra-deep strata, the proposed augmentation workflow increases data diversity by generating various virtual structures containing multi-scale folds, listric faults, oblique-slip displacement fields, and multi-directional fault drags. Tests on the field seismic data show that our method not only outperforms conventional seismic attributes but also has advantages over other machine learning methods.

Keywords

• fault detection
• deep learning
• training sets
• data augmentation
• geological structure