AccScience Publishing / JSE / Online First / DOI: 10.36922/JSE026260116
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Ensembles of lightweight U-Net-based models with EfficientNet encoders for semantic seismic data segmentation

Alexandre Gonçalves Silva1* ,  André Tavares da Silva2 ,  Rafael de Santiago1 ,  Mauro Roisenberg1
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1 Department of Informatics and Statistics, School of Technology, Federal University of Santa Catarina, Florianópolis, Santa Catarina , Brazil
2 Department of Computer Science, Center for Technological Sciences, Santa Catarina State University, Joinville, Santa Catarina , Brazil
Received: 25 June 2026 | Revised: 29 August 2026 | Accepted: 31 August 2026 | Published online: 16 September 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

Automated seismic facies segmentation can improve the consistency and efficiency of subsurface interpretation, but complex stratigraphic boundaries and imbalanced facies remain challenging. This work evaluates a reproducible pipeline for multiclass seismic facies segmentation based on simple probability-level ensembles of three U-Net-derived architectures that share an EfficientNet-B4 encoder: UNet++, CMUNeXt, and MultiResUNet. The models were trained and tested on the real field-acquired Netherlands F3 seismic benchmark, which contains six interpreted facies. During inference, each network produces class-wise softmax probability maps, and the ensemble averages these maps before pixel-wise classification. The individual models achieved mean intersection over union (mIoU) values of 0.710, 0.744, and 0.757, respectively. The CMUNeXt–MultiResUNet ensemble reached an mIoU of 0.762, while the three-model ensemble achieved the best overall balance among the proposed configurations, with mIoU = 0.766, frequency-weighted intersection over union (FWIoU) = 0.883, pixel accuracy (PA) = 0.934, and mean class accuracy (MCA) = 0.860. In a single-run ablation, disabling all training-time augmentation while retaining the same fixed normalization reduced the three-model ensemble mIoU from 0.766 to 0.719; augmentation improved PA, MCA, FWIoU, and mIoU for every evaluated model and ensemble. Relative to published F3 results, the proposed ensemble improves several global metrics over multiple baselines but does not surpass every prior method. These findings show that low-complexity ensemble averaging can exploit complementary class-wise behavior without introducing a separate meta-learner, providing a competitive and computationally practical baseline for automated seismic interpretation.

Keywords
Seismic segmentation
UNet++
CMUNeXt
MultiResUNet
EfficientNet-B4
Ensemble learning
Stratigraphic analysis
Funding
This research was funded by the project “4D Integrated Quantitative Characterization of Reservoirs” (FEESC/PETROBRAS/4600671602).
Conflict of interest
The authors declare they have no competing interests.
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Journal of Seismic Exploration, Print ISSN: 0963-0651, Published by AccScience Publishing