Pattern recognition technology gets a boost from software that analyzes what's in our heads as well as what's below the ground.
When someone touches your finger, your brainwaves reflect the touch. When you see a sentence that matches a picture you've been shown, your brainwaves reflect the comprehension. When a medication reaches your brain, brainwaves reflect its interaction and indicate how long it's active.
Until now, however, it's been virtually impossible to detect these minute changes. But the creators of a software program called Thoughtform claim to have developed a sophisticated waveform analysis application that can enhance any type of waveform to uncover previously hidden information.
Already the software has been used to identify specific brainwaves related to cognition and to monitor drugs as they enter the brain. It's also been used on a US Department of Defense project to improve the accuracy of polygraph examinations.
Why is this important for oil and gas exploration? Because seismic waves and brainwaves are similar. "It's even hard for the experts to tell the difference," said Dan Cook, the developer of Thoughtform. Cook has teamed with J.D. Walther to form a company called Seismic Insight Inc., with Cook acting as chairman and chief scientific officer and Walther serving as president and chief executive officer. The officers hope to offer consulting services and multiple products based on the use of the software tools to find oil and gas.
Rather than applying the same time-worn algorithms to stacked seismic data, the hope is to work with prestack data and to "teach" the software what to look for. Ideally, the system will begin to recognize hidden patterns within the data, then identify them and classify them. It will be aided in this learning process with proven well location data and dry hole information.
Cook and Walther say the system has many potential uses in the oil and gas industry. For one, it can be used for high-grade prospect analysis, identifying oil and gas events in a specific area to give a high probability of drilling success. It also can be used in area analysis, taking "ground truths," what's already known about an area, and using those to train the system to generate enhanced waves or to use a "similarity matrix" to survey the data and pinpoint prospective drilling sites.
It also can be used to enhance raw seismic data, picking out features of interest within the data, improving the stacking process and reducing noise. And it can be used on logging data to identify specific geology and potentially identify bypassed pay.
The hope is to find information in the raw data that stacking merely averages. Cook has examples of similar analysis applied to brainwaves. In the example of a finger being touched, for instance, a simple averaging of the different waves measured gives little useful information. But the system has been taught to look for reactive contrast between the finger being touched and the finger not being touched and easily targets the minute changes in brainwave response.
Is similar information hidden in prestack seismic data? Cook thinks so. "When you stack the data, 80% of the information is destroyed," he said. "Our technology is designed to harvest that information. There are indications within the seismic volume that light up where the oil or gas happens to be."
The system is trained to look for these states of reactive contrast within the seismic or well log data. "We apply an intelligent recipe of filters to the prestack gathers and look for a contrast between two states like oil and water, high porosity vs. low porosity, etc.," he said.
And the noise, that most intrusive of waveforms, is not filtered out. "Noise contains its own features," Cook said. "The algorithm figures out how to turn noise into signal."
He likened this process to a child learning a foreign language. At first it all sounds like noise, but eventually the child learns to differentiate which sounds mean which things.
The hope is to teach the system to apply the same technique to seismic waveforms using known information and expert human knowledge.
Cook and Walther are seeking partners within the oil industry to test the Thoughtform software on prospects. For more information, visit www.seismic insight.com.

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