Convolutional Neural Networks and Image Patches for Lithological Classification of Brazilian Pre-Salt Rocks

Lithological classification is a process employed to recognize and interpret distinct structures of rocks, providing essential information regarding their petrophysical, morphological, textural, and geological aspects. The process is particularly interesting regarding carbonate sedimentary rocks in the context of petroleum basins since such rocks can store large quantities of natural gas and oil. Thus, their features are intrinsically correlated with the production potential of an oil reservoir. This paper proposes an automatic pipeline for the lithological classification of carbonate rocks into seven distinct classes, comparing nine state-of-the-art deep learning architectures. As far as we know, this is the largest study in the field. Experiments were performed over a private dataset obtained from a Brazilian petroleum company, showing that MobileNetV3large is the more suitable approach for the undertaking.