Inpainting of local wavefront attributes using artificial intelligence for enhancement of massive 3-D pre-stack seismic data

Abstract

SUMMARYWe propose an advanced version of non-linear beamforming assisted by artificial intelligence (NLBF-AI) that includes additional steps of encoding and interpolating of wavefront attributes using inpainting with deep neural network (DNN). Inpainting can efficiently and accurately fill the holes in waveform attributes caused by acquisition geometry gaps and data quality issues. Inpainting with DNN delivers excellent quality of interpolation with the negligible computational effort and performs particularly well for a challenging case of irregular holes where other interpolation methods struggle. Since conventional brute-force attribute estimation is very costly, we can further intentionally create additional holes or masks to restrict expensive conventional estimation to a smaller subvolume and obtain missing attributes with cost-effective inpainting. Using a marine seismic data set with ocean bottom nodes, we show that inpainting can reliably recover wavefront attributes even with masked areas reaching 50–75 per cent. We validate the quality of the results by comparing attributes and enhanced data from NLBF-AI and conventional NLBF using full-density data without decimation.