Fully reversible neural networks for large-scale 3D seismic horizon tracking

Abstract

Tracking a horizon in seismic images or 3D volumes is an integral part of seismic interpretation. The last few decades saw progress in using neural networks for this task, starting from shallow networks for 1D traces, to deeper convolutional neural networks for large 2D images. Because geological structures are intrinsically 3D, we hope to see improved horizon tracking by training networks on 3D seismic data cubes. While there are some 3D convolutional neural networks for various seismic interpretation tasks, they are restricted to shallow networks or relatively small 3D inputs because of memory limitations. The required memory for the network states and weights increases with network depth. We present a fully reversible network for horizon tracking that has a memory requirement that is independent of network depth. To tackle memory issues regarding the network weights, we use layers that train in a factorized form directly. Therefore, we can maintain a large number of network channels while keeping the number of convolutional kernels low. We use the saved memory to increase the input size of the data by order of magnitude such that the network can better learn from large structures in the data. A field data example verifies the proposed network structure is suitable for seismic horizon tracking.