Deep Learning for Seismic Data Reconstruction: Opportunities and Challenges

Summary Natural and instrumental conditions during field seismic survey lead to noise and irregularities in acquired seismic data. In this work, we explore challenges and opportunities related to denoising and interpolation of seismic data by deep convolutional neural networks. In particular, we apply three network configurations to field data and match them with suitable applications. We show that U-Net is beneficial for denoising applications while adversarial generative networks (GAN) are superior in interpolation tasks. Enhanced interpolation capability of GANs, however, comes at cost of increased uncertainty in the results and we raise awareness about this observation. In the end, we consider the pitfalls of conventional metrics and outline the requirements for data-driven approaches to be suitable in production applications.