Semi-supervised learning for seismic impedance inversion using generative adversarial networks

Abstract

Seismic impedance inversion is essential to characterize hydrocarbon reservoir and detect fluids in field of geophysics. However, it is nonlinear and ill-posed due to unknown seismic wavelet, observed data band limitation and noise, but it also requires a forward operator that characterizes physical relation between measured data and model parameters. Deep learning methods have been successfully applied to solve geophysical inversion problems recently. It can obtain results with higher resolution compared to traditional inversion methods, but its performance often not fully explored for the lack of adequate labeled data (i.e., well logs) in training process. To alleviate this problem, we propose a semi-supervised learning workflow based on generative adversarial network (GAN) for acoustic impedance inversion. The workflow contains three networks: a generator, a discriminator and a forward model. The training of the generator and discriminator are guided by well logs and constrained by unlabeled data via the forward model. The benchmark models Mar-mousi2, SEAM and a field data are used to demonstrate the performance of our method. Results show that impedance predicted by the presented method, due to making use of both labeled and unlabeled data, are better consistent with ground truth than that of conventional deep learning methods.