Abstract

A fault is a geological structure that can be a migration path or a cap rock of hydrocarbon such as oil and gas, formed from source rock. The fault is one of the main targets of seismic exploration to find reservoirs in which hydrocarbon have accumulated. However, conventional fault detection methods using lateral discontinuity in seismic data such as semblance, coherence, variance, gradient magnitude and fault likelihood, have problem that professional interpreters have to invest lots of time and computational costs. Therefore, many researchers are conducting various studies to save computational costs and time for fault interpretation, and machine learning technologies attracted attention recently. Among various machine learning technologies, many researchers are conducting fault interpretation studies using the support vector machine, multi-layer perceptron, deep neural networks and convolutional neural networks algorithms. Especially, researchers use not only their own convolution networks but also proven networks in image processing to predict fault locations and fault information such as strike and dip. In this paper, by investigating and analyzing these studies, we found that the convolutional neural networks based on the U-Net from image processing is the most effective one for fault detection and interpretation. Further studies can expect better results from fault detection and interpretation using the convolutional neural networks along with transfer learning and data augmentation.

Keywords fault detection, machine learning, support vector machine, deep neural networks, convolutional neural networks