A scalable deep learning platform for identifying geologic features from seismic attributes

The modern requirement for analyzing and interpreting ever-larger volumes of seismic data to identify prospective hydrocarbon prospects within stringent time deadlines represents an ongoing challenge in petroleum exploration. To provide a computer-based aid in addressing this challenge, we have developed a “big data” platform to facilitate the work of geophysicists in interpreting and analyzing large volumes of seismic data with scalable performance. We have constructed this platform on a modern distributed-memory infrastructure, providing a customized seismic analytics software development toolkit, and a Web-based graphical workflow interface along with a remote 3D visualization capability. These support the management of seismic data volumes, attributes processing, seismic analytics model development, workflow execution, and 3D volume visualization on a scalable, distributed computing platform. Early experiences show that computationally demanding deep learning methods such as convolutional neural networks (CNN) provide improved results over traditional methods such as support vector machines (SVMs) and logistic regression for identifying geologic faults in 3D seismic volumes. Our experiments show encouraging accuracy in identifying faults by combining CNN and traditional machine learning models with a variety of seismic attributes, and the platform is able to deliver scalable performance.