Synthetic seismic data for training deep learning networks

Abstract

Deep learning is increasingly being used as a component of geoscience workflows for processing and interpreting seismic data. Training a supervised deep learning network is a data-hungry task: a significant number of data examples are needed and they must include labels. The data examples and their labels must have consistent patterns for the deep learning network to learn. Too few examples and/or poor-quality labels can lead to poor deep learning training results. One method to provide large quantities of training examples with high-quality labels is to create synthetic data. We discuss our techniques and experiences with our ongoing use of synthetic seismic data. We share our techniques as an open-source project concurrent with this paper at https://github.com/tpmerrifield/synthoseis. We hope that the geoscience community will share our enthusiasm for developing deep learning geoscience tools and for including synthetic seismic data in supervised deep learning training. We invite contributions from the geoscience community using the open-source model to collectively reduce the realism gap between synthetic data and field seismic data.