AccScience Publishing / JSE / Volume 35 / Issue 3 / DOI: 10.36922/JSE026180079
ARTICLE

Deep learning for three-dimensional seismic fault prediction using convolutional neural networks

Yasir Bashir1* Dilek Yüksel1 Begüm Akin1 Derin Gezer1 Muhsan Ehsan2 Muhammad Khan3 Syed Haroon Ali4
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1 Department of Geophysical Engineering, Faculty of Mines, İstanbul Technical University, İstanbul, Turkey
2 Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Bahria School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Bahria University, Islamabad, Pakistan
3 Saudi Aramco, Dhahran, Saudi Arabia
4 Department of Earth Sciences, Faculty of Science, University of Sargodha, Sargodha, Punjab, Pakistan
JSE 2026, 35(3), 026180079 https://doi.org/10.36922/JSE026180079
Received: 30 April 2026 | Revised: 21 May 2026 | Accepted: 28 May 2026 | Published online: 18 June 2026
© 2026 by the Author(s). This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ )
Abstract

Understanding seismic faults is essential for generating prospects, modeling reservoirs, and assessing carbon dioxide storage. Identifying faults in complex tectonic regimes presents significant challenges, especially in areas that have undergone multiple phases of tectonic activity. Even with advances in structural seismic attributes and machine learning, interpreters often rely on manual methods to examine complex fault systems. This work introduces a method for predicting three-dimensional seismic faults using convolutional neural networks (CNNs), effectively overcoming the constraints of conventional interpretation techniques. The research uses CNNs to demonstrate the effectiveness of seismic attributes in training models that identify faults with high accuracy and consistency. This approach, unlike manual interpretation, reduces time, costs, and subjective errors by leveraging automated learning techniques, thereby improving reproducibility and efficiency while reducing interpreter bias. The research highlights the growing importance of solid computational tools in geophysics, especially as seismic datasets become more complex and wider. The approach significantly enhances confidence in artificial intelligence-assisted geological analysis by validating its performance with real-world data. The validation accuracy rises from 0.936 to 0.9436 across configurations, while the validation loss increases from 0.5635 to 0.9941 across diverse patches of the trained model.

Keywords
Deep learning
Convolutional neural networks
Fault likelihood
Fault cube
Fault prediction
Funding
None.
Conflict of interest
The authors declare that they have no competing interests, financial or non-financial, that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper. The authors also declare that there are no personal relationships, affiliations, funding-related conflicts, or institutional interests that could be perceived as influencing the publication of this study.
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Journal of Seismic Exploration, Electronic ISSN: 0963-0651 Print ISSN: 0963-0651, Published by AccScience Publishing