Estimation of acoustic impedance from seismic data using temporal convolutional network

In exploration seismology, seismic inversion refers to the process of inferring physical properties of the subsurface from seismic data. Knowledge of physical properties can prove helpful in identifying key structures in the subsurface for hydrocarbon exploration. In this work, we propose a workflow for predicting acoustic impedance (AI) from seismic data using a network architecture based on Temporal Convolutional Network by posing the problem as that of sequence modeling. The proposed workflow overcomes some of the problems that other network architectures usually face, like gradient vanishing in Recurrent Neural Networks, or overfitting in Convolutional Neural Networks. The proposed workflow was used to predict AI on Marmousi 2 dataset with an average r² coefficient of 91% on a hold-out validation set.