GEOPHYSICS, VOL. 85, NO. 4 (JULY-AUGUST 2020); P. O47–O58, 19 FIGS., 2 TABLES.
10.1190/GEO2019-0627.1
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Seismic facies classification using supervised convolutional neural
networks and semisupervised generative adversarial networks
Mingliang Liu1, Michael Jervis2, Weichang Li3, and Philippe Nivlet2
ABSTRACT
Mapping of seismic and lithologic facies from 3D reflection
seismic data plays a key role in depositional environment analy-
sis and reservoir characterization during hydrocarbon explora-
tion and development. Although a variety of machine-learning
methods have been developed to speed up interpretation and im-
prove prediction accuracy, there still exist significant challenges
in 3D multiclass seismic facies classification in practice. Some
of these limitations include complex data representation, limited
training data with labels, imbalanced facies class distribution,
and lack of rigorous performance evaluation metrics. To over-
come these challenges, we have developed a supervised convo-
lutional neural network (CNN) and a semisupervised generative
adversarial network (GAN) for 3D seismic facies classification
in situations with sufficient and limited well data, respectively.
INTRODUCTION
Seismic facies analysis aims to interpret the depositional environ-
ment and facies distribution from reflection seismic data (Dumay
and Fournier, 1988), which is a fundamental and important step in
hydrocarbon exploration and development. In conventional work-
flows, facies are interpreted manually via collaboration among geo-
physicists, geologists, and petrophysicists. However, with 3D seismic
volumes drastically increasing in size, such manual interpretation be-
comes extremely time-consuming. Moreover, the results are typically
subjective and heavily rely on the experience of skilled interpreters
(Bond et al., 2007).
To overcome these limitations, great efforts have been made in
computer-assisted seismic interpretation, aiming to automate this
Manuscript received by the Editor 22 September 2019; revised manuscript received 23 March 2020; published ahead of production 2 June 2020; published
online 10 June 2020.
1
Aramco Research Center — Aramco Services Company, Houston, Texas, USA and University of Wyoming, Department of Geology and Geophysics,
Laramie, Wyoming, USA. E-mail: mliu4@uwyo.edu (corresponding author).
2
EXPEC ARC, Saudi Aramco, Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. E-mail: albajervis@yahoo.com; philippe.nivlet@aramco.com.
3
Aramco Research Center — Aramco Services Company, Houston, Texas, USA. E-mail: weichang.li@aramcoservices.com.
© 2020 Society of Exploration Geophysicists. All rights reserved.
O47
The proposed models can predict 3D facies distribution based
on actual well log data and core analysis, or other prior geologic
knowledge. Therefore, they provide a more consistent and
meaningful implication to seismic interpretation than commonly
used unsupervised approaches. The two deep neural networks
have been tested successfully on a realistic synthetic case based
on an existing reservoir and a real case study of the F3 seismic
data from the Dutch sector of the North Sea. The prediction
results show that, with relatively abundant well data, the super-
vised CNN-based learning method has a good ability in feature
learning from seismic data and accurately recovering the 3D fa-
cies model, whereas the semisupervised GAN is effective in
avoiding overfitting in the case of extremely limited well data.
The latter seems, therefore, particularly adapted to exploration
or early field development stages in which labeled data from
wells are still very scarce.
process. Examples of approaches include K-means, the support vec-
tor machine (Zhao et al., 2014; Wrona et al., 2018), the random
forest (Ao et al., 2019), self-organizing maps (Strecker and Uden,
2002; de Matos et al., 2006; Saraswat and Sen, 2012; Zhao et al.,
2017), generative topographic mapping (Roy et al., 2014), indepen-
dent component analysis (Lubo-Robles and Marfurt, 2019), and ar-
tificial neural networks (West et al., 2002; Saggaf et al., 2003) based
on different seismic attributes. One common issue of those ap-
proaches is that the choice of the particular input seismic attributes
has a significant impact on the classification results. This requires
the interpreter to choose the most optimal seismic attributes and
analysis window size in practice. However, the optimal attributes
can vary from one data set to the next depending on the local
geologic environment and data quality.
 O48
Recently, deep learning has become an emerging subfield of
machine learning, benefitting from the advancement in computing
resources, especially graphics processing units (GPUs), and access
to large amounts of data. This has led to a series of major break-
throughs, especially in computer vision and speech recognition. The
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main advantage of deep learning over traditional machine-learning
methods, such as the support vector machine, random forest, or any
form of shallow artificial neural network, is its powerful ability for
learning features and hierarchical representations from large sample
data sets in high-dimensional space and for handling arbitrary
nonlinear complexity. It allows automatic extraction of the salient
feature representation that is most sensitive for specific tasks of
interest, instead of hand-crafted attributes. For this reason, deep
learning has been applied to numerous geophysical applications.
For instance, Li (2018) uses a stacked autoencoder and the convolu-
tional neural network (CNN) for automated detection and classifi-
cation of multiclass geologic structure elements. The CNNs also
have been used to detect faults from seismic data (Huang et al.,
2017; Di et al., 2018a; Guitton, 2018; Xiong et al., 2018; Wu et al.,
2019a, 2019b), as well as applied to delineate salt bodies (Walde-
land et al., 2018; Di et al., 2018b; Shi et al., 2019). Qian et al. (2018)
apply a deep convolutional autoencoder in unsupervised seismic
facies classification; Dramsch and Lüthje (2018) and Zhao (2018)
investigate and compare different CNNs in supervised seismic
facies classification. Araya-Polo et al. (2018) apply the CNN to
estimate velocity models. Alfarraj and AlRegib (2019) introduce
recurrent neural networks to estimate petrophysical properties from
poststack seismic data.
Most machine- and deep-learning methods used in geophysics
applications can be categorized into unsupervised clustering and
supervised classification. In the unsupervised setting, there is no
prior labeled data, which means that only the input variables are
given, but with no corresponding output variables. The goal is to
model the underlying structure or distribution in the data space.
However, the main drawbacks are that it is usually difficult to de-
termine the number of clusters and, more critically, because clusters
are deemed to not have any well-defined geologic meaning, the re-
sults of unsupervised methods would require geologic interpretation
or calibration. As an alternative, supervised methods consider la-
beled data directly from well data or prior partial seismic strati-
graphic interpretation. Results obtained by such an approach
then are interpretable automatically, whether it is in terms of rock
type, lithology, fluid type or stratigraphic environment. However,
supervised methods require sufficient labeled training samples
(in number and/or in diversity). In new exploration areas where only
limited well data are available to generate labels, supervised learn-
ing methods may perform poorly in predicting properties away from
well locations. To overcome these types of challenges, semisuper-
vised learning is highly desirable because it makes use of limited
labeled samples and the large number of unlabeled samples. To
date, semisupervised learning methods have been ignored to a large
extent in geophysics (Alaudah et al., 2018).
Although deep learning has become increasingly popular in geo-
physics, significant challenges remain for 3D facies classification,
including data representation associated network complexity,
limited labeled data for training, imbalanced facies class distribu-
tion, and lack of rigorous performance evaluation in realistic set-
tings. In addition, facies class distribution in the training set is
not necessarily consistent with realistic settings. To address these
Liu et al.
challenges, we use a realistic 3D facies model and use only the in-
formation at well locations (lithofacies upscaled from well logs and
derived from core analysis) as labels to perform facies classification
from seismic reflection data with deep neural networks. Because the
amount of well data can vary from relatively abundant in older fields
to extremely rare in new prospects, we propose two types of deep-
learning frameworks: (1) a conventional 3D CNN (LeCun et al.,
1989) which relies on a substantial quantity of labeled data and
(2) a state-of-the-art semisupervised GAN (Salimans et al., 2016)
which requires only limited well data to be incorporated in the net-
work training process. Both approaches use convolutional layers
that take seismic subsections or subcubes as input instead of the
conventional trace-by-trace classification. As a result, the predicted
facies models are more consistent with the well and the seismic re-
flection data than the conventional methods.
METHODOLOGY
Supervised CNN
The CNN is a specialized class of deep neural networks that uses
convolutional layers to filter input data with a grid-like topology, such
as natural images and time series data, for useful information extrac-
tion. Because AlexNet won the ImageNet Large Scale Visual Rec-
ognition Challenge with remarkable accuracy in 2012 (Krizhevsky
et al., 2012), CNNs have become dominant and have achieved
state-of-the-art performance in various computer vision and speech
recognition tasks. The basic idea behind CNNs is inspired by the
structure of the human visual system to automatically and adaptively
learn spatial hierarchies of features from low- to high-level patterns:
the first convolutional layers aim to extract low-level meaningful
features (i.e., edges, corners, textures, and lines) from which the sub-
sequent convolution layers are able to compose increasingly abstract
and complex features (Zeiler and Fergus, 2014). It is the mechanism
of hierarchical feature learning that enables CNNs to capture the most
salient and sensitive feature representation for a specific task, such as
image classification and segmentation.
A CNN is different from a regular neural network, such as the
multilayer perceptron, in that it uses multiple convolutional layers
instead of fully connected layers to filter input data. This has sig-
nificant advantages in terms of computing efficiency and feature
representation. Neuron units in a fully connected layer typically in-
teract with all activations in the previous layer. It would become
computationally prohibitive and memory demanding for high-di-
mensional data. For example, to handle images at the size of 100 ×
100 neuron units, the number of trainable parameters in a hidden
layer with 100 neuron units can be as high as 1,000,000. Instead, a
convolutional layer takes advantage of the fact that one pixel is
more related to its neighbors than faraway locations by connecting
each neuron to only a local region of the input volume. To do that,
neuron units in the convolutional layer are organized as a group of
filters and a parameter sharing scheme is used to reduce the number
of parameters and make the computation more efficient. Parameter
sharing in CNNs basically means that the weight parameters of the
filters are constant when performed on different parts of the input
image. This also makes the extracted feature maps general and
meaningful, which is helpful in generalizing the network to other
tasks via transfer learning.
Because seismic volumes can be regarded as a particular type of
image, in this study, we attempt to investigate the feasibility and
 Seismic facies analysis with CNN and GAN
performance of CNNs in seismic facies interpretation. From the
available drilled wells, seismic samples at well locations can be as-
signed with reliable facies labels derived from well logs and core
analysis. With sufficient samples with labels, seismic facies inter-
pretation can be formulated as a supervised classification problem.
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Generally, CNNs use a set of convolutional layers to automatically
extract the hierarchical feature maps of the input images. Each con-
volutional layer consists of a stack of learnable filters that detect
specific features present in the input data. Each convolution output
is passed through a typically nonlinear activation function to intro-
duce nonlinearity into the model. To reduce the dimension of ex-
tracted feature maps and speed up the computation, a pooling layer,
such as max pooling, is periodically inserted between successive
convolutional layers. Pooling is a subsampling procedure that repla-
ces the values over a certain area with their summary statistics,
which is also helpful in making the feature representation approx-
imately invariant to small translations and scale changes (Goodfel-
low et al., 2016). Then, the feature maps extracted from the
intermediate convolutional layer are fed into the subsequent fully
connected layers to predict the probability of each class.
Training a neural network is an optimization problem, which is
equivalent to minimizing a predefined loss function. The loss func-
tion measures how good a model is and guides how to update the
model parameters during training, so it is critical to select proper
loss functions for different tasks. Specifically, seismic facies clas-
sification is a typical multiclass classification problem in which the
multiclass cross-entropy loss (equation 1) commonly is used:
1X N X K
L¼− Iðk; yi Þ log Pðyi ¼ kjxi Þ; (1)
N i¼1 k¼1
where K is the number of classes; N is the number of training sam-
ples; xi and yi represent the input (seismic patch or subcube) and
label (facies type) of training sample i, respectively; Iðk; yi Þ is the
indicator function that is equal to 1 if and only if sample i belongs to
class k; and Pðyi ¼ kjxi Þ is the output probability of the neural net-
work that sample i belongs to class k calculated from the output
layer through the softmax activation function.
Semisupervised generative adversarial networks
Supervised CNNs typically have millions of trainable parameters
to fit high-dimensional and nonlinear models. As a result, a tremen-
dous amount of labeled training samples is required to avoid
Figure 1. Illustration of semisupervised learning: (a) a possible decision boundary (dashed red line) using only one channel sample (white
circle) and one nonchannel sample (black circle), (b) the data distribution of the labeled and unlabeled samples (gray circles), and (c) the
updated decision boundary (dashed red curve) using the labeled and unlabeled samples.
O49
overfitting. Overfitting is an undesirable behavior in which the
trained model achieves a perfect fit on the training data but does
not generalize well on new test data. However, it is often expensive
or impractical to obtain a large number of labeled samples for train-
ing in seismic interpretation. In new prospects, drilled wells are
rather limited. Additionally, due to class imbalance, some of the
underrepresented facies could involve very few numbers of sam-
ples. Fortunately, 3D seismic volumes, however, provide millions
to billions of unlabeled samples. It is known that the use of unla-
beled data together with a small number of labeled samples can pro-
duce considerable improvement in learning accuracy by using
semisupervised learning. In this work, we propose a semisupervised
method based on the generative adversarial network (GAN) (Sali-
mans et al., 2016) to deal with the challenging case of few drilled
wells and insufficient labeled samples.
Semisupervised learning is a class of techniques that makes use
of labeled and unlabeled data for training, typically a small amount
of labeled data with a large amount of unlabeled data. Figure 1 il-
lustrates how unlabeled data can help in classification. The seismic
input data or attributes are represented in a multivariate space, but
for the sake of simplicity, only two dimensions are shown. If we
only consider the labeled data shown in Figure 1a, the optimal de-
cision boundary could be a straight line (or a hyperplane) and then
the sample shown in gray would be classified as channel facies.
However, if in addition to the labeled samples we also consider
all of the unlabeled samples (the gray circles shown in Figure 1b),
it is obvious that there exists some structure to the underlying dis-
tribution of those unlabeled data, which would help us update the
decision boundary as shown in Figure 1c. Then, the gray sample
shown in Figure 1a would be included in the nonchannel class.
The semisupervised GAN is a variant of the original GAN, which
is specialized to deal with learning problems with very few labeled
data. The GANs are a class of generative models devised by Good-
fellow et al. (2016), and they have since become widely known for
their application versatility and their often remarkable ability in gen-
erating realistic data. Unlike traditional neural networks, GANs
comprise two competing players each represented by a neural net-
work: the generator and the discriminator. The generator tries to
create samples that come from a targeted, yet unknown, probability
distribution (for instance, data points from Gaussian distribution
and channelized reservoir realizations) using random noise in a low-
dimensional space as the input, whereas the discriminator acts
like a judge to distinguish those samples produced by the generator
from the real samples. In other words, the training objective of the
 O50 Liu et al.
generative network is to increase the error rate of the discriminative
network by producing samples that are as similar as possible to the
real data, whereas it is exactly the opposite for the discriminative
network that aims to minimize the same error rate. When trained in
an alternative manner, the two networks would guide each other to
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become more skilled in their respective jobs. Eventually, the gen-
erator determines the underlying probability distribution of the data
and starts generating samples with realistic appearances. Figure 2
depicts the general architecture of a GAN.
The generator and the discriminator can be expressed by two dif-
ferentiable functions Gðz; θg Þ and Dðx; θd Þ, respectively. The term
Gðz; θg Þ maps the input noise variables z into the desired data space
x; conversely, Dðx; θd Þ outputs the probability that the data come
from the real sample data set. Here, θg and θd represent the model
parameters that define each neural network, respectively. Training
of GANs is equivalent to playing a minimax game with value func-
tion VðD; GÞ:
min max VðD; GÞ ¼ Ex∼pdata ðxÞ ½log DðxÞ
G D
þ Ez∼pz ðzÞ ½logð1 − DðGðzÞÞÞ: (2)
Because GANs are formulated as a game between two competing
networks, it is important to keep them in balance during training. If
either the generator or the discriminator is much better than the
other, the training would not converge. For this reason, GANs
are generally more difficult to train than a regular deep neural net-
work. Radford et al. (2015) introduce deep convolutional generative
adversarial networks to help bridge the gap between the success of
CNNs for supervised learning and the challenge in unsupervised
learning, and they introduce a combination of techniques as the
key to stabilize the training of GANs and to deal with poor weight
initialization problems, including (1) using CNNs to build the gen-
erator and the discriminator, (2) batch normalization (Ioffe and
Szegedy, 2015), and (3) convolutions with stride instead of pooling
layers.
The original design of GANs is for data generation rather than
classification, for example, for image and signal synthesis, in which
the discriminator is used only to help training the generator and then
Figure 2. Schematic architecture of the original GAN consisting of the generator, which
tries to create samples that come from a targeted yet unknown probability distribution,
and the discriminator to distinguish those samples produced by the generator from the
real samples.
discarded after training. To make it applicable for semisupervised
learning, Salimans et al. (2016) transform the discriminator into a
multiclass classifier that has dual roles in the label prediction as well
as in the discrimination of samples generated by the generator from
the real data. To be more specific, the discriminator takes an input
sample and classifies it into K þ 1 classes, where K is the number of
classes of the classification task: the first K dimensions represent
the classes to be classified, and the last dimension indicates whether
the input sample is real or fake. For example, in the case with four
seismic facies for classification, we need to convert the discrimina-
tor into a five-class classifier: The first four classes are for the indi-
vidual class probabilities of facies, and the last class is an indicator
of whether the input sample is generated from the generator or from
real seismic data.
The loss function of semisupervised GAN is defined in such a
way that the discriminator can help the generator learn to produce
realistic images and, by distinguishing between real and fake sam-
ples, the discriminator uses the fake data generated from the gen-
erator along with the labeled and unlabeled real data to help classify
the data set. Therefore, the overall loss function in the discriminator
has three terms associated with (1) real samples with labels, (2) real
samples without labels, and (3) fake samples from the generator, as
described in the following equation:
LD ¼ Lsupervised þ Lunsupervised ; (3)
where
Lsupervised ¼ −Ex;y∼pdata ðx;yÞ ½log pmodel ðyjx; y < K þ 1Þ; (4)
Lunsupervised ¼ −fEx∼pdata ðxÞ ½logð1 − pmodel ðy ¼ K þ 1jxÞÞ
þ Ex∼G ½log pmodel ðy ¼ K þ 1jxÞg: (5)
The loss function of the discriminator includes the unsupervised
loss that is the same as the loss function defined in equation 2 and an
additional supervised loss term that measures the predicted error
rate on real samples with labels. In the training
stage, the discriminator will predict the probabil-
ities of the K þ 1 classes for all of the input sam-
ples including the labeled and unlabeled samples
from the training set and samples generated from
the generator. When a real sample from the train-
ing set is fed regardless of being labeled or un-
labeled, it will be assigned a high probability of
real facies classes and a low probability of fake
classes, whereas it is the opposite for samples
generated from the generator. In the prediction
stage, we only keep the predicted probabilities
of the first K classes and drop the last dimension.
The combination of these losses associated with
different sources of data will enable the classifier
to learn from a broader perspective. That, in turn,
allows the model to perform inference much
more precisely than only using very few labeled
examples. Although we use the same weights for
the supervised and unsupervised loss in this
 Seismic facies analysis with CNN and GAN O51

study, we can tune the hyperparameters to control the trade-off be-
tween labeled and unlabeled data.
In addition, to avoid the discriminator overconfidence in which
the network learns very limited features for classification and leads
to bad performance in prediction, it is desirable to add regularization
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Synthetic data with CNN
The first example is a synthetic case of 3D lithofacies prediction
using supervised CNNs. The data set is generated from a realistic
synthetic model that is based on an existing on-shore field. The
3D facies model has been built by geostatistics using lithofacies

to penalize the discriminator when the predicted probability for any

real sample goes beyond a threshold (e.g., 0.9). This is called one- from actual wells and the structural framework that has been derived
sided label smoothing (Salimans et al., 2016). from an existing reservoir model covering an area of approximately
For the generator, the loss function is supposed to use feature 620 km2 . The reservoir model consists of five units, in which the
matching that minimizes the statistical difference between the fea- three units of most interest are placed in the layers with constant
tures of the real and fake samples from the generator instead of the elastic properties (referred to as BG1). As shown in Figure 3,
difference in sample data space (e.g., between pixels in case of im- the middle unit consists of channel levee systems simulated by
age inputs). This is useful to stabilize training of the networks and the unconstrained object-based simulation technique in a constant
make the classifier have good generalization capability. Typically, background (flood plains), whereas facies in the upper and lower
we measure the L2 distance between the mean feature vectors: units are simulated by the unconstrained stationary sequential indi-
cator simulation technique. The detailed simulation workflow is
 2 given by Pyrcz and Deutsch (2014). The fractions and P-impedance
 
LG ¼ Ex∼pdata ðxÞ ½fðxÞ − Ez∼pz ðzÞ ½fðGðzÞÞ

; (6) values of facies in each unit are listed in Table 1. Because the P
2 impedance of the levee facies is identical to one facies (BG5) in
the top unit, we use the same label for them in the classification.
where fð·Þ is the feature vector extracted in an immediate layer by
the discriminator.
Table 1. Fractions and P-impedance values of facies in the top,
middle, and bottom units.
APPLICATIONS
Facies P impedance
To demonstrate the applicability and performance of the pro- Geologic unit Facies name fraction (g/cm3 * m/s)
posed deep neural networks in 3D seismic facies classification, we
present three examples in this section, including (1) supervised Upper BG3 0.19 10,000
CNNs on a realistic synthetic model with sufficient well data, BG4 0.16 8200
(2) semisupervised GAN on the synthetic model with limited well BG5 0.65 9000
data, and (3) semisupervised GAN on the F3 seismic survey from
Middle Flood plain 0.85 8500
the Dutch sector of the North Sea.
Channel 0.09 9100
Levee 0.06 9000
Lower BG2 0.04 9300
BG3 0.11 10,000
BG4 0.81 8200

Figure 3. Synthetic example shows (a) the lithofacies model and

(b) the corresponding 3D seismic volume. Figure 4. Histogram of facies classes in the training set of CNN.
 O52
In total, there are seven target lithofacies to be classified. Then, the
corresponding 3D poststack seismic data are generated by 1D con-
volution with a 25 Hz Ricker wavelet of the zero-offset reflectivity
derived from the P-wave velocity and density information.
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Figure 5. Architecture of the proposed CNN models: The yellow blocks represent the
convolutional layers, the orange blocks represent the max-pooling layers, and the purple
blocks represent the fully connected layers.
Figure 6. Loss and accuracy on (a) the training set and (b) the validation set.
Figure 7. Confusion matrix of the prediction on the validation set.
Liu et al.
To mimic the scenario of a mature field, we randomly select 256
(16 × 16) traces from the synthetic geologic model as
pseudowells and split them into two subsets: 200 wells as a train-
ing set and 56 wells as a validation set. Next, we generate labeled
samples along such pseudowells by taking
the seismic samples around a specific point as
input and the associated facies label as output.
Figure 4 shows the facies class distribution.
As shown, the training set consists of approxi-
mately 15,000 labeled samples. Such a large
number of diverse labeled samples would allow
us to perform classification using supervised
CNNs and potentially avoid overfitting. To bet-
ter discover and exploit the spatial structures in
the seismic data, we adopt a 3D CNN model in
this case, which takes seismic subcubes as the
inputs and performs the convolution operations
in 3D.
As illustrated in Figure 5, the network archi-
tecture is adapted from the VGGNet (Simonyan
and Zisserman, 2014). We use three convolu-
tional blocks to extract feature maps from seis-
mic samples, which then are followed by three
fully connected layers and eventually a softmax
layer to predict the class probability. Each con-
volutional layer or fully connected layer is fol-
lowed by the ReLU activation function, which
enables the CNNs to handle nonlinearity. In the
network, the input size is 32 × 32 × 32, and the
filter size of all of the 3D convolutional layers is
(3, 3, 3). Because seismic facies are generally
more continuous horizontally than vertically, the
CNN model is sensitive to the pooling size along
the vertical axis. In this study, the pooling size
of the three max-pooling layers is set to (2, 2, 4),
(2, 2, 4), and (2, 2, 2), respectively.
Figure 6 shows the training history using the
Adam optimizer (Kingma and Ba, 2014) with a
batch size of 256 and a learning rate of 0.001. Based on the training
history, we choose the ideal point to stop training at approximately
750 epochs to minimize the possibility of overfitting. The prediction
accuracy on the validation set is 0.82, and the F1 score and average
precision score are 0.81 and 0.89, respectively, which are more use-
ful to evaluate the model performance in the case of severely im-
balanced data sets. Figure 7 shows the normalized confusion matrix
from which we can determine the prediction accuracy and the
misclassification of each facies class. We can observe that the
3D CNN works well on most facies, but some channels are difficult
to detect. There are two distinct problems causing the misclassifi-
cations: (1) elastic parameters of levee facies are close to channels
and (2) channels are thin in general close to the resolution limits of
the seismic data.
Following training, we perform prediction on the entire seismic
volume using the trained model. Figure 8 shows several example
stratigraphic slices of the predicted facies along with the ground
truth. We can observe that all facies are predicted with high accu-
racy and most channels are discovered with a convincing accuracy
despite the lower prediction score of channels from the confusion
matrix.
 Seismic facies analysis with CNN and GAN O53

One powerful aspect of deep learning is the

ability to map the input data into a learned feature
space where samples belonging to different
classes can be better separated. This effect can
be observed in Figure 9 which shows the plotting
of the T-distributed stochastic neighbor embed-
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ding (t-SNE; van der Maaten and Hinton, 2008)

visualization of the original seismic data and the
features extracted from the last convolutional
layer in the 3D CNN. As shown, it is evident that
the samples of different lithofacies, initially over-
lapping in the seismic data space, become sepa-
rable groups in the feature space generated in the
trained CNN model.

Synthetic data with GAN

The supervised CNN models perform
adequately in the case with abundant well data.
Figure 8. Stratigraphic slices extracted from the upper (a and d), middle (b and e), and
But the performance will deteriorate quickly and bottom (c and f) units: (a-c) the true model and (d-f) results from 3D CNN.
eventually fail in cases with few drilled wells
where the number of training data samples drops,
and the model becomes overfitted. This greatly
limits their application in practice, especially in
new exploration areas. In this example, we use
the same synthetic model as used in example
1 to demonstrate the feasibility of the semisuper-
vised GAN in seismic facies classification with
very few labeled data. In contrast to example
1, we only select 16 (4 × 4) vertical traces from
the model as pseudowells along which the input
samples are generated by stacking three orthogo-
nal seismic patches with size of 32 × 32 along
the inline, crossline, and time axis similar to a
multichannel image with size of 32 × 32 × 3.
Here, we use all pseudowells to generate samples
and then split the obtained samples into training
set (80%) and validation set (20%) instead of
splitting by wells. The sample distribution is Figure 9. A t-SNE visualization of (a) the original seismic data and (b) the extracted
features by the 3D CNN.
shown in Figure 10. In this case, only approxi-
mately 1000 samples with labels are available
and, more critically, some of the underrepresented facies such as
channels have very few samples (e.g., channel facies = 28 samples)
emphasizing the class imbalance.
Figure 11 shows the network architecture of the semisupervised
GAN used in this study. The generator and the discriminator are
built as 2D CNNs. The generator takes a batch of Gaussian noises
with dimension of 128 as input to synthesize data with the same size
as the training samples (32 × 32 × 3) by one fully connected layer
and three convolutional layers. Unlike the pooling layer in CNNs
for classification, each convolutional layer in the generator is fol-
lowed by an upsampling layer to increase the dimension of feature
maps. To adapt the seismic classification task with seven facies
classes, the discriminator is designed as an eight-class classifier,
which takes the real sample from the training set and the fake sam-
ples from the generator as input. It consists of seven convolutional
layers and two fully connected layers. First, we train the generator
and the discriminator networks on the labeled samples extracted
along pseudowells and unlabeled samples evenly extracted along
the inline, crossline, and time direction from the seismic data. In Figure 10. Histogram of facies classes in the training set of GAN.
 O54 Liu et al.

the inference phase, the generator is discarded, and the discrimina- For a fair comparison, we also train a supervised 2D CNN on the
tor is used for the final prediction. Figure 12 shows the accuracy same training set. Given that both networks have difficulty in dis-
curves of the discriminator during training and validation. We criminating channels from levees, potentially due to the limited res-
choose the ideal point to stop training at approximately 20 epochs olution of the seismic data, the similarity of facies in terms of elastic
to minimize the possibility of overfitting. properties, and the insufficient number of total samples (labeled or
unlabeled) of both facies to adequately learn their
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features, we merge the levees to channel facies in

postprocessing so as to better interpret the results.
The normalized confusion matrices for the semi-
supervised GAN and the CNN model evaluated
on the entire volume are provided in Figure 13.
We can observe that the CNN tends to misclassify
channels and levees as background and floodplain
facies, which are both dominant facies in this case,
an indication of overfitting. The false-negative
channel/levee predictions are from overrepre-
sented facies classes. In comparison, the semisu-
pervised GAN has significantly more true
positives (diagonal values). Figure 14 compares
the predictions from the networks versus the true
Figure 11. Architecture of the proposed semisupervised GAN in which the discrimi- facies. As shown in the 3D views, the semisuper-
nator is extended to an eight-class classifier. vised GAN recovers most facies even with very
limited well data, whereas the CNN performs very
poorly. A close-up view of the central unit containing the channel
facies, as highlighted by the arrows in Figure 15, shows that most
channels are predicted with sufficient accuracy by the semisupervised
GAN and are not well estimated by the supervised CNN.

Field data
Next, we apply the semisupervised GAN model to the F3 block
seismic data made publicly available by the Dutch government
through TNO and dGB Earth Sciences. Inline 339 has been inter-
preted manually with label data freely accessed from https://github.-
com/bolgebrygg/MalenoV. Unlike the definition of facies types in
the synthetic example based on lithofacies information from well
log and core analysis, in this case, nine different seismic facies are
defined according to their seismic reflection characteristics: eight
facies with distinct reflection patterns and one facies used to re-
present samples not belonging to the eight target facies (see Table 2).
Because the number and patterns of the seismic facies (i.e., width
and torsion of channels) vary with the seismic data, it is challenging
Figure 12. Training and validation accuracy. to directly transfer the trained network on the synthetic data to the
real field data. For this reason, in this case, we
reuse the network architecture with minor
changes but retrain it from scratch.
The neural network used in this study is sim-
ilar to the model in example 2 except (1) we
adopt 3D convolutional and deconvolutional
layers to build the generator and the discrimina-
tor and (2) we use a larger sample size of
64 × 64 × 64. We also alter the dimension of out-
put of the discriminator to 10 accordingly. To
generate the training set, we extract 20,000 sam-
ples from inline 339 that have been interpreted
previously (Figure 16) and from which we ran-
domly select 50 samples per facies class as la-
beled data with the remaining as unlabeled
Figure 13. Confusion matrix of the prediction on the validation set: (a) semisupervised data. For the latter, the label information is
GAN and (b) supervised CNN. masked only during training, and it is put back
 Seismic facies analysis with CNN and GAN
and used during validation for model evaluation. After training of
the networks, the generator is discarded and the discriminator is
used to perform facies prediction on the entire seismic volume. Fig-
ure 17a and 17b shows the classification results on inline 339 and
xline 775. It is evident that the predicted target facies distribution is
Downloaded 06/23/20 to 137.111.162.20. Redistribution subject to SEG license or copyright; see Terms of Use at http://library.seg.org/
very consistent with the seismic reflection characteristics.
To evaluate the performance of the semisupervised GAN, we com-
pare its results to the supervised 3D CNN by using 10 and 50 labeled
samples per facies class, respectively. Figure 18 shows the t-SNE
visualization of seismic samples in the validation set before being
transformed by deep neural networks, and Figure 19 shows the t-
SNE visualization of feature maps extracted from the last convolution
layers in 3D CNN and the discriminator of the GAN. We can see that
the validation samples become separable in the transformed feature
space of CNN and GAN. Compared to the supervised CNN, the
semisupervised GAN can further separate the facies groups with
the help of unlabeled data. The prediction accuracies of the semisu-
pervised GAN on the validation set with 10 and 50 labeled samples
per facies class are 85.8% and 97.5%, respectively, compared with
accuracies of 70.2% and 80.4% for the supervised CNN.
O55
DISCUSSION
Although the proposed supervised CNN and semisupervised
GAN for facies classification work well on the synthetic and real
Table 2. Seismic facies defined in the F3 seismic data.
Facies number Seismic reflection characteristic
1 Low coherency
2 High-amplitude continuous
3 Low-amplitude dips
4 High-amplitude dips
5 Chaotic
6 Low amplitude
7 High amplitude
8 Salt
9 Everything else
Figure 14. The 3D view of the true and predicted
lithofacies model: (a) true model, (b) predicted
model from the supervised CNN, and (c) predicted
model from the semisupervised GAN.
Figure 15. Stratigraphic slices (a) 30 ms,
(b) 60 ms, (c) 90 ms, and (d) 120 ms above the
bottom of the channel reservoir; columns from
left to right: the true model, predicted model
from the semisupervised GAN, and predicted
model from the supervised CNN, respectively.
 O56 Liu et al.
seismic data sets, running inference on the entire 3D volume is very
time consuming, which would severely restrict the applications
when GPUs are not available. To solve this limitation, some at-
tempts have been made to convert facies classification from seismic
to an image segmentation problem using deep neural networks such
Downloaded 06/23/20 to 137.111.162.20. Redistribution subject to SEG license or copyright; see Terms of Use at http://library.seg.org/
as UNet (Ronneberger et al., 2015; Di et al., 2019). Instead of point-
wise classification, those segmentation networks take a 2D seismic
section or 3D subvolume as input and are able to predict the facies
at each pixel simultaneously. However, that usually requires com-
pletely interpreted seismic sections or subvolumes to train the segmen-
tation networks, which makes them not applicable for identification of
rock and fluid types in which the label information is only available at
well locations. An alternative solution to speed up the computing time
Figure 16. Seismic data and prior seismic facies
interpretation of inline 339.
Figure 17. Predicted seismic facies include (a) in-
line 339 and (b) xline 775.
is to adopt lightweight networks such as MobileNet (Howard et al.,
2017), MobileNetV2 (Sandler et al., 2018), ShuffleNet (Zhang et al.,
2018), and ShuffleNetV2 (Ma et al., 2018). In the future, we will com-
prehensively investigate the performance of the lightweight networks
and compare them with the standard CNNs in terms of accuracy and
computing time.
As discussed in the synthetic case, generally it is challenging to
discriminate the lithofacies that have similar P impedances, such as
the channel and levee, from poststack seismic data. To further im-
prove the prediction accuracy, it would be helpful to train the net-
works on prestack seismic data that contain more information about
rock and fluid types. Additionally, in real applications, the seismic
data are contaminated by noise, the lithofacies labels are derived
 Seismic facies analysis with CNN and GAN O57

from well logs, and core analysis usually includes uncertainty. More
effort is necessary to address these challenges.

CONCLUSION
We have proposed two types of deep neural network frameworks
Downloaded 06/23/20 to 137.111.162.20. Redistribution subject to SEG license or copyright; see Terms of Use at http://library.seg.org/

for 3D seismic facies classification calibrated from well log data.

Fully supervised CNNs are recommended for mature fields with
relatively abundant well data, and semisupervised GAN work well
for new prospects with limited wells. The CNNs are powerful and
efficient for feature representation using seismic data and, thus, pro-
vide more accurate seismic facies characterization. Semisupervised
GAN can be extremely helpful to avoid model overfitting by best
utilizing labeled and unlabeled samples. Both types of models have
been tested successfully on a realistic synthetic data set and a field
seismic volume, indicating significant potential of these deep-learn-
ing methods in conventional quantitative seismic interpretation
workflows. They can provide a robust method for combining well
data and 3D seismic data to automate and improve seismic facies
interpretation.

Figure 18. A t-SNE visualization of the original seismic data. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The authors would like to thank dGB Earth Sciences for provid-
ing the F3 North Sea seismic data to the public and ConocoPhillips
for sharing the MalenoV project for public use.

DATA AND MATERIALS

AVAILABILITY
Data associated with this research are confi-
dential and cannot be released.

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