BiInNet: Bilateral Inversion Network for Real-Time Velocity Analysis

Most previous studies focus on using complex deep neural networks to learn diverse features of massive synthetic data. In more realistic situations with a limited number of data pairs, complex networks not only have higher computational complexity, increasing training time and reducing inference speed, but also tend to over-fit a small amount of training data, thus having weak generalization capability. To address the aforementioned problem, we propose a lightweight architecture for real-time velocity inversion in realistic situations, the bilateral inversion network (BiInNet). BiInNet uses lightweight ResNet18, ShuffleNetV2, and modified MobileNetV2 as backbones, taking into account the inversion accuracy and inference speed. To reduce the redundant information in common shot gathers and focus on graphical property features which are strongly correlated with velocity, the intermediate results of velocity analysis, semblances, and interval velocity models are prepared as data pairs. Numerical experiments show that BiInNet can infer interval velocity models in real-time, with frames per second (FPS) up to 76.90 when ResNet18 is used as the backbone. Moreover, BiInNet achieves the best inversion accuracy on more realistic fold models, fault models, salt models, and noisy dataset (NFOMD) when adopting ShuffleNetV2 as the backbone, which illustrates that BiInNet can be applied to velocity inversion tasks of different geological structures and is robust to noise. Adopting transfer learning to fine-tune pretrained model, BiInNet is effectively applicable to velocity reversal models and field data, which further demonstrates the reliability of the proposed method and provides a practical velocity inversion scheme when the field data pairs are insufficient.