Self-Attention Fully Convolutional DenseNets for Automatic Salt Segmentation.

Journal: IEEE transactions on neural networks and learning systems
Published Date:

Abstract

3-D salt segmentation is important for many research topics spanning from exploration geophysics to structural geology. In seismic exploration, 3-D salt segmentation is directly related to the velocity modeling building that affects many processing steps, such as seismic migration and full waveform inversion. Manually picking the salt boundary becomes prohibitively time-consuming when the data size is too large. Here, we develop a highly generalized fully convolutional DenseNet for automatic salt segmentation. A squeeze-and-excitation network is used as a self-attention mechanism for guiding the proposed network to extract the most significant information related to the salt signals and discard the others. The proposed framework is a supervised technique and shows robust performance when applied to a new dataset using transfer learning and a small amount of training data. We test the robustness of the proposed framework on the Kaggle TGS salt segmentation dataset. To demonstrate the generalization ability of the framework, we further apply the trained model to an independent dataset synthesized from the 3-D SEAM model. We apply transfer learning to finely tune the trained model from the TGS dataset using only a small percentage of data from the 3-D SEAM dataset and obtain satisfactory results.

Authors

  • Omar M Saad
  • Wei Chen
    Department of Urology, Zigong Fourth People's Hospital, Sichuan, China.
  • Fangxue Zhang
  • Liuqing Yang
    Department of Anesthesiology, Institute of Anesthesia, Emergency and Critical Care, Northern Jiangsu People's Hospital Affiliated to Yangzhou University, 225002 Yangzhou, Jiangsu, China.
  • Xu Zhou
    School of Biomedical Engineering, Health Center, Shenzhen University, China; Medical UltraSound Image Computing (MUSIC) Lab, Shenzhen University, China.
  • Yangkang Chen