Shear wave velocity prediction based on 1DCNN-BiLSTM network with attention mechanism

The Shear wave (S-wave) velocity is an essential parameter in reservoir characterization and evaluation, fluid identification, and prestack inversion. However, the cost of obtaining S-wave velocities directly from dipole acoustic logging is relatively high. At the same time, conventional data-driven S-wave velocity prediction methods exhibit several limitations, such as poor accuracy and generalization of empirical formulas, inadequate exploration of logging curve patterns of traditional fully connected neural networks, and gradient explosion and gradient vanishing problems of recurrent neural networks (RNNs). In this study, we present a reliable and low-cost deep learning (DL) approach for S-wave velocity prediction from real logging data to facilitate the solution of these problems. We designed a new network sensitive to depth sequence logging data using conventional neural networks. The new network is composed of one-dimensional (1D) convolutional, bidirectional long short-term memory (BiLSTM), attention, and fully connected layers. First, the network extracts the local features of the logging curves using a 1D convolutional layer, and then extracts the long-term sequence features of the logging curves using the BiLSTM layer, while adding an attention layer behind the BiLSTM network to further highlight the features that are more significant for S-wave velocity prediction and minimize the influence of other features to improve the accuracy of S-wave velocity prediction. Afterward, the nonlinear mapping relationship between logging data and S-wave velocity is established using several fully connected layers. We applied the new network to real field data and compared its performance with three traditional methods, including a long short-term memory (LSTM) network, a back-propagation neural network (BPNN), and an empirical formula. The performance of the four methods was quantified in terms of their coefficient of determination (R 2), root mean square error (RMSE), and mean absolute error (MAE). The new network exhibited better performance and generalization ability, with R 2 greater than 0.95 (0.9546, 0.9752, and 0.9680, respectively), RMSE less than 57 m/s (56.29, 23.18, and 30.17 m/s, respectively), and MAE less than 35 m/s (34.68, 16.49, and 21.47 m/s, respectively) for the three wells. The test results demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed approach, which has the potential to be widely applied in real areas where S-wave velocity logging data are not available. Furthermore, the findings of this study can help for a better understanding of the superiority of deep learning schemes and attention mechanisms for logging parameter prediction.