Improving accuracy and efficiency of seismic data analysis using deep learning
Creators: name: Kaur, Harpreet
Publisher: name: The University of Texas at Austin
Year: 2022
Subjects: Wave propagation
Wave mode separation
Boundary conditions
True amplitude imaging
Deep learning
Neural networks

description: The ultimate goal of seismic data analysis is to retrieve high-resolution information about the subsurface structures. It comprises different steps such as data processing, model building, wave propagation, and imaging, etc. Increasing the resolution and fidelity of the different seismic data analysis tasks eventually leads to an improved understanding of fine-scale structural features. Conventional implementation of these techniques is computationally intensive and expensive, especially with large data sets. Recent advances in neural networks have provided an ability to produce a reasonable result to computationally intensive and time-consuming problems. Deep neural networks are capable of extracting complex nonlinear relationships among variables and have shown efficacy as compared to conventional statistical methods in different areas. A major bottleneck for seismic data analysis is the tradeoff between resolution and efficiency. I address some of these challenges by implementing neural network based frameworks. First, I implement a neural network based workflow for stable and efficient wave extrapolation. Conventionally, it is implemented by finite differences (FD), which have a low computational cost but for larger time-steps may suffer from dispersion artifacts and instabilities. On the other hand, recursive integral time extrapolation (RITE) methods, especially the low-rank extrapolation, which are mixed-domain space-wavenumber operators are designed to make time extrapolation stable and dispersion free in heterogeneous media for large time steps, even beyond the Nyquist limit. They have high spectral accuracy; however, they are expensive as compared to finite-difference extrapolation. The proposed framework overcomes the numerical dispersion of finite-difference wave extrapolation for larger time steps and provides stable and efficient wave extrapolation results equivalent to low-rank wave extrapolation at a significantly reduced cost. Second, I address wave-mode separation and wave-vector decomposition problem to separate a full elastic wavefield into different wavefields corresponding to their respective wave mode. Conventionally, wave mode separation in heterogeneous anisotropic media is done by solving the Christoffel equation in all phase directions for a given set of stiffness-tensor coefficients at each spatial location of the medium, which is a computationally expensive process. I circumvent the need to solve the Christoffel equation at each spatial location by implementing a deep neural network based framework. The proposed approach has high accuracy and efficiency for decoupling the elastic waves, which has been demonstrated using different models of increasing complexity. Third, I propose a hyper-parameter optimization (HPO) workflow for a deep learning framework to simulate boundary conditions for acoustic and elastic wave propagation. The conventional low-order implementation of ABCs and PMLs is challenging for strong anisotropic media. In the tilted transverse isotropic (TTI) case, instabilities may appear in layers with PMLs owing to exponentially increasing modes, which eventually degrades the reverse time migration output. The proposed approach is stable and simulates the effect of higher-order absorbing boundary conditions in strongly anisotropic media, especially TTI media, thus having a great potential for application in reverse time migration. Fourth, I implement a coherent noise attenuation framework, especially for ground-roll noise attenuation using deep learning. Accounting for non-stationary properties of seismic data and associated ground-roll noise, I create training labels using local-time frequency transform (LTF) and regularized non-stationary regression (RNR). The proposed approach automates the ground-roll attenuation process without requiring any manual input in picking the parameters for each shot gather other than in the training data. Lastly, I address the limitation of the iterative methods with conventional implementation for true amplitude imaging. I implement a workflow to correct migration amplitudes by estimating the inverse Hessian operator weights using a neural network based framework. To incorporate non-stationarity in the framework, I condition the input migrated image with different conditioners like the velocity model and source illumination. To correct for the remnant artifacts in the deep neural network (DNN) output, I perform iterative least-squares migration using neural network output as an initial model. The network output is close to the true model and therefore, with fewer iterations, a true-amplitude image with the improved resolution is obtained. The proposed method is robust in areas with poor illumination and can easily be generalized to more-complex cases such as viscoacoustic, elastic, and others. The proposed frameworks are numerically stable with high accuracy and efficiency and are, therefore, desirable for different seismic data analysis tasks. I use synthetic and field data examples of varying complexities in both 2D and 3D to test the practical application and accuracy of the proposed approaches