Intelligent Deblending of Seismic Data Based on U-Net and Transfer Learning

The blended acquisition allows multiple sources to be simulated simultaneously in a narrow time interval, which can improve the acquisition efficiency and reduce the acquisition cost tremendously. However, the overlapped information from multiple sources poses challenges for traditional seismic data migration or inversion algorithms. Thus, accurate and efficient deblending should be implemented as a pre-requisite. Traditional inversion-based deblending algorithms can provide deblended data with a high computational burden, especially for a large volume of seismic data. As a deep learning strategy can match seismic data accurately in a nonlinear way through supervised learning, we propose a U-net-based accurate deblending algorithm, which incorporates transfer learning and an iterative strategy. A set of labeled synthetic data with a blending fold of 2 are classified into the training and validation data for U-net training and validation. Field data are regarded as the test data to assess the performance of the trained U-net. To guarantee the deblending performance of the field data to some extent, parts of field data with labels are used to fine-tune the trained U-net based on transfer learning. The fine-tuning procedure is relatively fast within several minutes. To further improve the deblending performance, we incorporate an iterative strategy with the fine-tuned U-net. The deblending performance is promising in the quality and computational efficiency compared with the curvelet-thresholding-based deblending method, which demonstrates the validity of the proposed intelligent deblending method.