Generative models for the transfer of knowledge in seismic interpretation with deep learning

Interpreting seismic data requires the characterization of a number of key elements such as the position of faults and main reflections, presence of structural bodies, and clustering of areas exhibiting a similar amplitude versus angle response. Manual interpretation of geophysical data is often a difficult and time-consuming task, complicated by lack of resolution and presence of noise. In recent years, approaches based on convolutional neural networks have shown remarkable results in automating certain interpretative tasks. However, these state-of-the-art systems usually need to be trained in a supervised manner, and they suffer from a generalization problem. Hence, it is highly challenging to train a model that can yield accurate results on new real data obtained with different acquisition, processing, and geology than the data used for training. In this work, we introduce a novel method that combines generative neural networks with a segmentation task in order to decrease the gap between annotated training data and uninterpreted target data. We validate our approach on two applications: the detection of diffraction events and the picking of faults. We show that when transitioning from synthetic training data to real validation data, our workflow yields superior results compared to its counterpart without the generative network.