Empirical evaluation on utilizing cnn-features for seismic patch classification

This paper empirically evaluates two kinds of features, which are extracted, respectively, with traditional statistical methods and convolutional neural networks (CNNs), in order to improve the performance of seismic patch image classification. In the latter case, feature vectors, named “CNN-features”, were extracted from one trained CNN model, and were then used to learn existing classifiers, such as support vector machines. In this case, to learn the CNN model, a technique of transfer learning using synthetic seismic patch data in the source domain, and real-world patch data in the target domain, was applied. The experimental results show that CNN-features lead to some improvements in the classification performance. By analyzing the data complexity measures, the CNN-features are found to have the strongest discriminant capabilities. Furthermore, the transfer learning technique alleviates the problems of long processing times and the lack of learning data.