ADDCNN: An Attention-Based Deep Dilated Convolutional Neural Network for Seismic Facies Analysis With Interpretable Spatial–Spectral Maps

With the dramatic growth and complexity of seismic data, manual seismic facies analysis has become a significant challenge. Machine learning and deep learning (DL) models have been widely adopted to assist geophysical interpretations in recent years. Although acceptable results can be obtained, the uninterpretable nature of DL (which also has a nickname “alchemy”) does not improve the geological or geophysical understandings on the relationships between the observations and background sciences. This article proposes a noble interpretable DL model based on 3-D (spatial–spectral) attention maps of seismic facies features. Besides regular data-augmentation techniques, the high-resolution spectral analysis technique is employed to generate multispectral seismic inputs. We propose a trainable soft attention mechanism-based deep dilated convolutional neural network (ADDCNN) to improve the automatic seismic facies analysis. Furthermore, the dilated convolution operation in the ADDCNN generates accurate and high-resolution results in an efficient way. With the attention mechanism, not only the facies-segmentation accuracy is improved but also the subtle relations between the geological depositions and the seismic spectral responses are revealed by the spatial–spectral attention maps. Experiments are conducted, where all major metrics, such as classification accuracy, computational efficiency, and optimization performance, are improved while the model complexity is reduced.