Automated fault detection without seismic processing

• Main Authors: Araya-Polo, Mauricio (Author), Dahlke, Taylor (Author), Frogner, Charlie (Author), Hohl, Detlef (Author), Zhang, Chiyuan (Contributor), Poggio, Tomaso A (Contributor)
• Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences (Contributor), Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (Contributor)
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Society of Exploration Geophysicists, 2017-06-20T15:32:51Z.
• Subjects: Article
• Online Access: Get fulltext

 For hydrocarbon exploration, large volumes of data are acquired and used in physical modeling-based workflows to identify geologic features of interest such as fault networks, salt bodies, or, in general, elements of petroleum systems. The adjoint modeling step, which transforms the data into the model space, and subsequent interpretation can be very expensive, both in terms of computing resources and domain-expert time. We propose and implement a unique approach that bypasses these demanding steps, directly assisting interpretation. We do this by training a deep neural network to learn a mapping relationship between the data space and the final output (particularly, spatial points indicating fault presence). The key to obtaining accurate predictions is the use of the Wasserstein loss function, which properly handles the structured output - in our case, by exploiting fault surface continuity. The promising results shown here for synthetic data demonstrate a new way of using seismic data and suggest more direct methods to identify key elements in the subsurface.