A cyclic learning approach for improving pre-stack seismic processing

Abstract

Current seismic processing workflows in the oil and gas industry involve several interactions between different experts to optimize the overall data quality in various tasks, such as noise attenuation, velocity analysis and horizon picking. While many machine learning-based approaches have been proposed to support each of those steps, most of them disregard expert interactions to guide the overall optimization. This paper presents geocycles, a cyclic learning approach that mimics this iterative process, which can be applied to different pre-stack seismic processing tasks. Our method refactor these processes considering training, testing, and evaluation sub-tasks, which allow the selection of samples for greedy sequential processes targeting an overall optimum quality for very large seismic datasets. We present encouraging results showing that a cyclic structure and efficient quality metrics improved overall outcomes in up to 128% for two different seismic processing tasks in comparison to a 1-cycle machine learning approach.