An Open-Source Package for Deep-Learning-Based Seismic Facies Classification: Benchmarking Experiments on the SEG 2020 Open Data

Recently, intelligent data processing and interpretation based on deep learning (DL) have received considerable attention. Training data are vital for DL-based approaches. In geosciences, researchers have been facing a significant obstacle, i.e., the absence of authoritative and representative open data for training and testing artificial neural networks (ANNs). Although open-source works in geosciences are increasing, the quantity is currently limited. With the aid of the Society of Exploration Geophysicists (SEG) 2020 Machine Learning (ML) Blind-Test Challenge Data, we open source a package for DL-based seismic facies classification (SFC). We regard SFC as translating the seismic data into the facies by training a flexible end-to-end encoding–decoding-style ANN “BridgeNet” revised from U-Net. Inspired by the residual network (ResNet), we further enhance the BridgeNet by inserting the identity shortcut connections, which can theoretically ease the notorious problem of vanishing/exploding gradients. The evaluated framework, however, is not restricted to SFC. We hope that it can provide some insights that help researchers to construct and train ANNs that yield reliable and robust results in their own tasks. We carry out benchmarking experiments to investigate some crucial factors impacting the ANN’s performance to elucidate how we obtained our current optimal results on the SEG 2020 ML Challenge Data. The accuracy and continuity of predicted facies along the training and testing sections indicate that the results are consistent with geologic sedimentation, verifying the generalization capability of the enhanced flexible end-to-end encoding–decoding-style BridgeNet. For SFC, we recommend a memory-saving sparse categorical cross-entropy (CC) loss function to improve the efficiency. The codes are available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5787673.