Deep Compressed Learning for 3D Seismic Inversion

We consider the problem of 3D seismic inversion from pre-stack data using a very small number of seismic sources. The proposed solution is based on a combination of compressed-sensing and machine learning frameworks, known as compressed-learning. The solution jointly optimizes a dimensionality reduction operator and a 3D inversion encoder-decoder implemented by a deep convolutional neural network (DCNN). Dimensionality reduction is achieved by learning a sparse binary sensing layer that selects a small subset of the available sources, then the selected data is fed to a DCNN to complete the regression task. The end-to-end learning process provides a reduction by an order-of-magnitude in the number of seismic records used during training, while preserving the 3D reconstruction quality comparable to that obtained by using the entire dataset.

Encoder-Decoder Architecture for 3D Seismic Inversion

Inverting seismic data to build 3D geological structures is a challenging task due to the overwhelming amount of acquired seismic data, and the very-high computational load due to iterative numerical solutions of the wave equation, as required by industry-standard tools such as Full Waveform Inversion (FWI). For example, in an area with surface dimensions of 4.5km $\times$ 4.5km, hundreds of seismic shot-gather cubes are required for 3D model reconstruction, leading to Terabytes of recorded data. This paper presents a deep learning solution for the reconstruction of realistic 3D models in the presence of field noise recorded in seismic surveys. We implement and analyze a convolutional encoder-decoder architecture that efficiently processes the entire collection of hundreds of seismic shot-gather cubes. The proposed solution demonstrates that realistic 3D models can be reconstructed with a structural similarity index measure (SSIM) of 0.8554 (out of 1.0) in the presence of field noise at 10dB signal-to-noise ratio.