t Special section: Formation evaluation using petrophysics and borehole geophysics

Automated gamma-ray log pattern alignment and depth matching by

machine learning
Shirui Wang1, Qiuyang Shen1, Xuqing Wu2, and Jiefu Chen1
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Abstract
Depth matching of multiple logging curves is essential to any well evaluation or reservoir characterization.
Depth matching can be applied to various measurements of a single well or multiple log curves from multiple
wells within the same field. Because many drilling advisory projects have been launched to digitalize the well-log
analysis, accurate depth matching becomes an important factor in improving well evaluation, production, and
recovery. It is a challenge, though, to align the log curves from multiple wells due to the unpredictable structure
of the geologic formations. We have conducted a study on the alignment of multiple gamma-ray well logs by
using the state-of-the-art machine-learning techniques. Our objective is to automate the depth-matching task
with minimum human intervention. We have developed a novel multitask learning approach by using a deep
neural network to optimize the depth-matching strategy that correlates multiple gamma-ray logs in the same
field. Our approach can be extended to other applications as well, such as automatic formation top labeling for
an ongoing well given a reference well.

Introduction The traditional practice of pattern alignment was ac-

Digitalization becomes a key factor in improving
drilling productivities. Under the new digital frame-
work, the drilling data and parameters are transferred,
integrated, and processed by the digitalized advisory
system. The visualization of real-time drilling parame-
ters and the intelligent analysis process are key compo-
nents in the system. Monitoring drilling data from
multiple wells and performing evaluations across wells
need to synchronize their depth scale, which is impor-
tant for accurate formation interpretation and precise
drilling control. As the function of depth, different types
of measurement support the formation evaluation by
probing the physical properties around the borehole,
such as the rock conductivity, radioactivity, porosity,
and permeability. Gamma-ray logs are widely used
for depth matching or correlation between wells be-
cause it is a good indicator of the natural radioactivity
and is standardized as the basic measurement. A dis-
tinct pattern of the gamma-ray log is oftentimes pre-
sented when there is a disruptive change of formation
properties or rock types. Therefore, the task of depth
matching of two wells falls into the area that aligns
gamma-ray measurements by identifying similar pat-
terns among gamma-ray log curves.
complished manually by picking up similar sequential
patterns among different gamma-ray log curves. This la-
bor-intensive job is prone to human error and is tar-
nished with imprecise labeling due to the lack of a
consistent evaluation criterion. Reliability becomes a
big issue even for an experienced geologist when facing
these complex curve patterns. Various methods have
been proposed to assist the curve matching task (Zang-
will, 1982; Kerzner, 1984; Lineman et al., 1987; Zoraster
et al., 2004). Measuring the crosscorrelation between
two sequences is the most straightforward approach,
in which a high crosscorrelation indicates high similar-
ity, hence a potential match. However, crosscorrelation
is sensitive to measurement noises and other perturba-
tion factors that could distort the log curves and intro-
duce false-positive matches. Some common distortion
factors include shifting, pattern stretching and com-
pacting, and missing measurements. Moreover, the
choice of the distance metric also plays a significant
role in quantifying the similarity. Dynamic time warping
(DTW) has been applied to compare curves by many
works in various fields (Aach and Church, 2001; Khol-
matov and Yanikoglu, 2005; Petitjean et al., 2011), and it
is a distortion-tolerance approach. DTW (Sakoe, 1971;

1
University of Houston, Cullen College of Engineering, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Houston, Texas 77004, USA. E-mail:
sruiwang1182@gmail.com; sqygg@hotmail.com; chenjiefu@gmail.com.
2
University of Houston, College of Technology, Department of Information and Logistics Technology, Houston, Texas 77004, USA. E-mail:
xwu8@central.uh.edu.
Manuscript received by the Editor 11 September 2019; revised manuscript received 14 November 2019; published ahead of production 18 De-
cember 2019; published online 23 March 2020. This paper appears in Interpretation, Vol. 8, No. 3 (August 2020); p. SL25–SL34, 10 FIGS., 3 TABLES.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1190/INT-2019-0193.1. © 2020 Society of Exploration Geophysicists and American Association of Petroleum Geologists. All rights reserved.

Interpretation / August 2020 SL25

 Sakoe et al., 1990) was proposed for measuring the sim-
ilarity between two temporal sequences, and it has been
implemented in many signal processing applications
such as speech recognition. Unlike correlation, DTW
takes the shape transformation between sequences into
account and searches for the optimal match even when
the distortion exists.
However, the direct use of DTW to align two sequen-
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ces may not be ideal due to its high computational cost.
The complexity of the algorithm is Oðn2 Þ, where n de-
notes the length of the matching sequence. The length
of the subsequence cannot be too large or the computa-
tional time could exponentially increase. More impor-
tantly, DTW takes presumption that the two ends of
the candidate curves are aligned, so a manual alignment
of both ends is needed before the matching process. By
using a sliding window, DTW compares all of the sub-
sequences of the target one by one and takes the one
with the minimum value as the matched pattern. The
DTW-based matching workflow is complicated when
considering the length of the logging curve, different
depth resolutions, potential shifting range in the current
work, etc. It is a delicate task to deploy the DTW
method directly to solve the depth-matching problem.
Due to the aforementioned limitations, the industry
still relies on the empirical interpretation of the geolo-
gists. Although there exist algorithms to measure the
correlation between different logging curves, they suf-
fer from either the impreciseness or the dramatic in-
crease of computing time as the number of wells
increases. As one of the most promising solutions, ma-
chine-learning-based algorithms have been gradually
adopted and applied to many areas. A recent review
(Bergen et al., 2019) summarized several applications
by using machine-learning and data-driven methods.
In particular, cumulative historical data can be used
to train a predictive model to analyze the new data.
In other words, we could build an intelligent depth-
matching algorithm by observing a large number of well
logs with named well tops and mining implicit curve
patterns. Zimmermann et al. (2018) and Liang et al.
(2019) present a neural network-based solution to solve
log synchronization problems. By comparing a candi-
date pattern segment and a subsequence of the same
length of the target log, the model can locate the posi-
tion of the matching pattern on the target log. Their re-
sult demonstrates that a neural network can be used to
quantify the similarity of two fixed-length curves with
high confidence. However, because the search is con-
ducted locally, there is a limitation on the distance of
maximum shifting and the method is not suitable for
two curves with a significant shift and covering a great
depth.
In this paper, we take advantage of the multitask
learning technique and have proposed a dynamic
matching algorithm using a deep neural network
(DNN). DNN has been proven to have satisfactory per-
formance (Krizhevsky et al., 2012) for many pattern-rec-
ognition and prediction-related tasks. Leveraged by the
SL26 Interpretation / August 2020
unsupervised feature extraction performed hierarchi-
cally through a process of coarse graining, DNN is used
in this paper to learn the sequential pattern of gamma-
ray log curves. To deliver a fully automated depth-
matching framework, our DNN also learns a nonlinear
matching strategy to overcome the shift between
curves. The objective of the network is to automatically
locate the corresponding depth of the proposed pat-
terns for a new logging sequence by comparing to a
reference well log.
In this paper, a dynamic matching system is proposed
by using a DNN, which is built upon 1D convolution
layers. The system can automatically suggest a tracking
movement to find the best matching pattern between a
query and a target gamma-ray log. A multitask learning
approach is adopted to take global and local information
into consideration during the pattern matching. The sys-
tem is trained and tested with synthetic data augmented
from real logging data, and its performance is reported in
the “Experiment” section. Future extension and im-
provement are discussed in the end.
Conventional methods
Crosscorrelation and DTW are two classic methods
for measuring the similarity or distance between two
time series. However, there are inevitable drawbacks
when directly using these algorithms. Crosscorrelation
is defined in equation 1, which is the integral of two time
series at each corresponding time-delay point. It is effi-
cient when the data are clean and the shape of the pat-
tern is fixed. But in the gamma-ray log depth-matching
problem, in which distortion and noise take place, cross-
correlation becomes inapplicable. As shown in Figure 1,
the matched pattern is far from the ground truth:
X
∞
ðf ⋆gÞ½n ¼ f ½i g½n þ i: (1)
i¼−∞
Instead of measuring the difference between differ-
ent curves point-wisely, DTW takes a dynamic program-
ming approach to locate the optimal matching pattern
globally. It captures the global trajectory information
and mitigates the influence of distortion, shifting, and
noise. The rules followed by DTW are as shown in equa-
tion 2, where A ¼ fai gm n
i¼1 and B ¼ fbi gi¼1 denote two
1D series with length m and n. The term δðai ; bj Þ is the
distance of ai and bj (usually the Euclidean distance).
The distance is computed recursively from the first
points of A and B to the end:
8 9
< DðAi−1 ; Bj Þ =
DðA; BÞ ¼ δðai ; bi Þ þ min DðAi−1 ; Bj−1 Þ : (2)
: ;
DðAi ; Bj−1 Þ
The disadvantage of this approach is obvious: It is a
nonlinear algorithm, and the computational complexity
 is high. Thus, for a well log with a depth of thousands
feet, making a depth matching using DTW-based ap-
proach is very time consuming. The execution time
for different lengths can be seen in Table 1.
Machine-learning-based algorithm
Given a segment of gamma-ray-series (query) that
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indicates a proposed pattern on a reference log (refer-
ence), the aim is to find the best-matched subsequence
on another gamma-ray series (target). We proposed a
DNN-based algorithm to solve this problem. A DNN with
1D convolution layers is built to extract features from a
Figure 2. An illustration of the curve-matching process. The series in the blue box is the query, and the purple box represents the
initialization of the tracker on the target. The tracker will move forward or backward on the reference series until the DNN finds
the best matching (red box) and the tracker to stop.
Table 1. Time consumption of DTW.
Execution time on inputs of different length by DTW
Length (point) 100 200 400
Time (s) 0.16 0.68 2.71
given gamma-ray log. A concept of tracker is used here
to describe the matching process. To be specific, the
tracker is a sliding window with a fixed length, and
the central point of the window indicates the current po-
sition on the target. Given a query subsequence and ini-
tialize the tracker at a depth, it can move back and forth
on the target well and compare the current subsequence
within the tracker to the query, until it finds the best-
matched pattern and stops. The action of the window
is controlled by its moving directions (e.g., left versus
right), which is automatically predicted by the DNN. This
process can be seen in Figure 2.
Figure 1. Pattern matching by crosscorrela-
tion. The upper row shows the target log on
the left and the candidate subsequence to
match on the right. The lower row demon-
strates the crosscorrelation at each depth
for the candidate. The green line indicates
the ground truth of the matching, and the
red line marks the matching depth by the
crosscorrelation method.
800 1000 2000 4000 8000
10.93 17.12 68.14 276.56 1123.21
Interpretation / August 2020 SL27
 Deep neural network
The DNN has been extensively used in the geoscience
domain recently due to its outstanding performance in
many classification and regression applications. Convo-
lutional neural network (CNN) is one of the most suc-
cessful network structures, which is widely used in 2D
image processing for image classification, semantic seg-
mentation, and object detection. CNN consists of multi-
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ple convolutional layers and a set of learnable filters.
During the forward pass, it will extract semantic informa-
tion and features from the given images or time series.
These high-level features are very robust with regard to
shifting or distortion caused by noise. Because weights
are shared among different nodes within a layer, the for-
ward pass is computationally efficient. In this paper, we
adopt the CNN structure and use 1D convolutional layers
to convolve the gamma-ray logs, and the extracted fea-
tures are then classified by the following fully connected
layers to predict the action for the tracker. The network
structure is shown in Figure 3. Given a target log of
length L and a query log of length l, the input of the
CNN consists of two channels. The first channel is the
log of the target well, a data series represented by
S ¼ fsi gL−1
i¼0 . The second channel is a replicate of the first
channel except for a subsequence of length l replaced by
the query log Q ¼ fqi gl−1
i¼0 . Let us specify the index of the
central point of the current tracking window on the tar-
get as C T and C T ∈ fbl∕2c; L − bl∕2cg. The data series of
the second channel S 0 can be formed by
8 h jk jk i
<q  j k i ∈ C − l ;C þ l − 1
T T
2 2
si0 ¼ i− C T − l
2 (3)
: action. Based on the action prediction vector, a
si otherwise;
Figure 3. An overview of the workflow and the structure of the neural network. The input is a dual-channel vector (9000 × 2).
Each box represents a multichannel feature map.
Figure 4. The process to construct the input
for the neural network.
SL28 Interpretation / August 2020
where i ∈ f0; L − 1g. Thus, the double channel input is
I ¼ ½S; S 0 . Figure 4 shows the construction of the input
given a target log, a query log, and the current position of
the tracker. The network deploys a multitask learning
scheme and has two outputs as shown in Figure 3: (1) Ac-
tion instruction Ak , a vector of length three indicating
three alternative actions [forward, backward, stop]
suggested by the network for moving the tracker at time
τk . (2) A matching probability Mk , a scalar indicating
whether the query has been matched by the tracker at
the current position. By exploiting commonalities and
differences across action prediction and matching justi-
fication, multitask learning can help improve the perfor-
mance and robustness of the neural network.
Dynamic matching system
The workflow of the matching process is shown
in Figure 3. At the beginning, a query Q of length
l is given with the central point at the location
C Q ¼ indexðqi¼bl∕2c Þ on the reference log. The tracker
T0 ¼ ft0;i gl−1
i¼0 of the same length l is initialized on the
target log series S ¼ fsi gL−1 i¼0 at the same depth (i.e.,
C T 0 ¼ indexðt0;i−bl∕2c Þ ¼ C Q ). Thus, we get the initial in-
put of the network I0 ¼ ½S; S00 . Assuming that the
center of the best-matched tracking window for the
query is located at C  ∈ fbl∕2c; L − bl∕2cg on the series
S. At each step τk ∈ fτ0 ; : : : ; τn g, the network iteratively
takes an input Ik to predict a matching probability sca-
lar Mk , which indicates whether the current tracker has
matched the query, and an action probability vector Ak ,
which indicates a “moving forward” (if C T k < C  ), “mov-
ing backward” (if C T k > C  ), or “stopping” (if C T k ¼ C  )
stochastic action scheme is performed on the tracker
 to make it move forward (C T kþ1 ¼ C T k þ stepsize) or
backward (C T kþ1 ¼ C T k − stepsize) along the target S
and stop when the pattern is matched, i.e., Mk >
threshold.
Stochastically weighted action
The model produces an action prediction at each
matching iteration. Occasionally, mispredictions hap-
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ing elastic distortion (Simard et al., 2003) and random
shifting on them. The logs are split into training and test-
ing data proportionally (83% and 17%). In total, 6000 in-
put samples are generated for each log pair, and we
collected more than 1 million training samples in total
and split 20% of them for validation. Error-tolerant
matching criteria are defined to improve the smooth-
ness of the model. For a tracker centered at C T and

pen during this dynamic process and the tracker’s a query that matches the target log at C  , the ground-
movement can be stalled before it moves to the optimal truth action prediction A and matching probability
location. To improve the overall robustness of the sys- M are defined as
tem, we take a stochastic approach to jump out of the
8
local minima. Instead of depending on the deterministic < ½1; 0; 0 if C T < C  − 25
prediction at a single location, the action decision A ¼ ½0; 1; 0 if C T > C  þ 25 ;
 (7)
scheme consists of two steps: (1) For a tracker Tk lo- :
½0; 0; 1 otherwise
cating at C T k at kth step, we take its adjacent locations
into account. Sliding the tracking window from
C T k − bm∕2c to C T k þ bm∕2c, we generate m inputs
Im
k ¼ ½Ik;0 ; : : : ; Ik;m−1 , respectively, and input them into

1 if C T ∈ ½C  − 25; C  þ 25
the network. Thus, for each tracker T k , the network M ¼ : (8)
will output m prediction vectors for action. Stacking 0 otherwise
together, we have an m × 3 probability matrix
Amk ¼ ½A k;0 ; : : : ; A k;m−1  for action. The average of each
column forms a probability vector:
Multitask loss
1 X
m −1 In multitask training, each loss for a task is assigned
Ak ¼ Ak;i ¼ ½P f ; P b ; P s : (4) a weight based on the magnitude of importance. The
m i¼0 weights are often chosen and tuned manually. It is time

The averaging process acts as a smoother, eliminates

Algorithm 1. Dynamic matching system.
small mispredictions during the process, and effectively
increases the accuracy. The same averaging process
is also implemented on the matching probability Mk . Require: Queries: Q. Target log: S. Trained model: M.
(2) Based on Ak , a historically averaged action proba- Averaging number m.
bility vector is computed as Ensure: Using a tracker T to find the alignment of Q on S,
1P where CT ¼ C .
k
A if k > 0 1: Initialize T0 ; ðCT 0 ¼ CQ Þ
Ak ¼ fP f ; P b ; P s g ¼ k i¼0 i : (5)
Ak otherwise 2: Generate Im k , (k = 0) from T0
3: repeat
After the two steps, a randomization scheme is 4: Am m
k ; Mk ⇐MðIk Þ
m
P Pm−1
implemented to choose the action. The next moving 5: Ak ; Mk ¼ m1 m−1 i¼0 Ak;i ; m
1
i¼0 Mk;i
direction is determined by sampling an action accord- 6: if Mk > threshold then
ing to Ak . The moving step size is the product of a 7: break
default step size and the probability of the chosen 8: end if
action, i.e., P
9: Ak ¼ 1k k−1 i¼0 Ak
 10: actionk ¼ stochasticactionðAk Þ
direction ∼ Ak ¼ ½P f ; P b ; P s 
action ¼ : (6) 11: Tkþ1 ⇐Tk ðactionk Þ
stepsize ¼ P direction × default stepsize
12: Im kþ1 ⇐Tkþ1
13: k ¼ k þ 1
This stochastic action selection can effectively avoid 14: until k ¼¼ kmax
local minimum traps. A complete dynamic depth- 15: if Mk > threshold then
matching algorithm is shown in Algorithm 1. 16: preserve Tk
17: else
Experiment 18: discard Tk
Data processing 19: end if
To augment the training set, we generate 177 syn- 20: Output: CTk
thetic gamma-ray log pairs based on 59 real logs by add-

Interpretation / August 2020 SL29

 consuming and becomes unsustainable when the prob-
lem scales up. Kendall et al. (2018) propose a method to
accomplish this task in an efficient way. Instead of tun-
ing the weights artificially after each training and vali-
dation experiment, we make them learnable parameters
and let the network learn them by itself. In this work,
the weighted loss is formulated as equation 9, where σ 1
and σ 2 are the learnable weights of the action prediction
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task and matching classification task. The terms LA and
LM are the cross-entropy losses:
1 1
Lðσ 1 ; σ 2 Þ ¼ LA þ 2 LM þ log σ 1 σ 2 :
σ 21 σ2
Training and testing
The training and validation performance are shown
in Figure 5. The first row shows the cross-entropy
losses of the action prediction and the matching classi-
fication during training, and the second row shows the
accuracy. The variation of two learnable weights is
shown in Figure 6. The overall training and validation
metric are presented in Table 2. The validation accu-
racy is greater than 98% for action prediction and
matching classification, which indicates that the net-
Table 2. Loss and accuracy for action prediction and
matching indication.
Action prediction Matching classification
(train/validation) (train/validation)
Loss 0.02/0.09 0.01/0.02
Accuracy 99.3%/98.0% 99.5%/99.4%
Figure 5. The variation of loss and accuracy a)
during training.
c)
SL30 Interpretation / August 2020
work effectively recognizes the pattern as well as
captures spatial correlations.
Figure 7 demonstrates the effectiveness of using the
stochastically weighted approach to improve the
matching process. In each figure, the query and the tar-
get log are presented in the first two rows, respectively,
with the red dot marking the center of the ground truth.
In the bottom three rows, the green lines represent the
action decided under different decision schemes. A
higher value on the green line indicates a “backward”
prediction, which will move the tracker to the left of
its current location. A lower value indicates a “forward”
(9)
prediction. A middle value indicates a “stop” prediction.
The only two circumstances that the tracker will stop
are (1) the action alternates forward and backward
in two consecutive predictions and (2) a stop predic-
tion. As shown in the top green line of Figure 7a, which
is obtained by the direct output of the model at every
single position, there are multiple local minima for ac-
tion predictions and they could lead to a wrong stop
decision. By averaging the m adjacent action predic-
Action
Match
Figure 6. The variation of weights for two outputs during
training.
b)
d)
 tion, the local minima problem is suppressed as shown
in the middle green line of Figure 7a. However, it is not
good enough when the action prediction is less accu-
rate as shown in Figure 7b. Mispredictions are not fully
eliminated as shown by the middle green line, and the
matching process is stalled by local minima. By taking
the average of historical predictions, an optimal action
is selected as shown at the bottom row of Figure 7.
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query. At the end of the iterations, if no matched pattern
is found (i.e., Mk < 0.5; ∀ k ∈ 0; 1; : : : ; kmax ), we aban-
don this tracker. Figure 9a and 9b represents two suc-
cessful matching and Figure 9c and 9d presents two
abandoned matching.
The nonlinear matching strategy driven by the action
prediction has a significant impact on the computa-
tional efficiency. A single matching process of the pro-

When the tracker moves to the matched pattern, it will posed method takes an average of approximately 0.53 s
be stopped by the matching classifier Mk . for 9000 logging points. Without action prediction, an
We test our model on the testing data. The accura- exhaustive search guided by the DNN along takes ap-
cies for the action prediction and matching classifica- proximately 25 s. Meanwhile, a DTW exhaustive search-
tion are 91.2% and 96.0%, respectively. Figure 8 ing process could take more than 30 s.
shows the confusion matrix of the matching classifica- Figure 10 shows examples of the complete depth-
tion M. Due to the low false-positive rate, only 2% of matching process. First, patterns are randomly pro-
negative matches will be classified as positive and posed on the reference log. By using the proposed
the majority (98%) of the mismatches will be filtered dynamic matching system, successful matchings will
out by the matching classifier. Meanwhile, the true-pos- be retained. Further alignment between two matching
itive rate is comparably high, which means that most patterns can be done by using either a linear mapping
positive matches (94%) will be retained. or DTW as shown in Figure 10d.
Four examples of the matching results are shown in
Figure 9. All four plots show the tracker’s state at the
end of the matching process. In each plot, the reference
log is on the left side. A rectangle and a horizontal black
line indicate the query pattern and its location. The tar-
get log is plotted on the right, and the rectangle on it
represents the tracker at the current iteration. A num-
ber in the range ½0; 1 is annotated to each tracker,
which is the matching probability M given by the
CNN. During the dynamic matching process presented
in Algorithm 1, if the matching probability is higher than
the threshold, which is 0.5 in our experiment, the
matching process is stopped and the current location
of the tracker C k is preserved as the alignment of the Figure 8. The confusion matrix of the matching indication.

a) b)

Figure 7. Demonstrations of the matching process. The first row shows the query proposed from the reference well, and the blue
dot indicates the center. The second row shows a segment of the target well. The red dot on the target well marks the ground truth
of matching. The three green lines represent action decisions using three different approaches: (1) deterministic action predicted
via Ak;bm∕2c without considering the m adjacent locations of the current tracker; (2) action predicted after averaging the m adjacent
action probability vectors Am k ; and (3) action predicted via Ak , which is the average of the historical action probabilities. The
tracker is initialized on the left end and right end, respectively, in (a and b). The green arrows indicate its forward or backward
movements. Compared to the deterministic approach, a stochastic method has better chances to overcome local minima. The best
performance is obtained when taking historical predictions into consideration.

Interpretation / August 2020 SL31

 a) b)
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c) d)

Figure 9. Matching examples of the dynamic matching process. (a and b) Two successful matches. (c and d) Two discarded
mismatches due to the low matching probability.

SL32 Interpretation / August 2020

 a) b)
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Figure 10. Examples of the point-to-point depth matching. (a-c) Three pattern alignment results by the dynamic matching system.
The blue line represents a reference log, and the green one is the target log. The center of proposed patterns and their matching
pair are marked on the reference log and target log, respectively. (d) Uses linear mapping and DTW to align points between pattern
matching pairs.
Conclusion
In this work, we proposed an automatic gamma-ray
log pattern alignment and depth-matching algorithm us-
ing DNN and multitask learning. Based on the action and
matching probability predicted by the DNN, a dynamic
matching strategy is stochastically drafted to shift the
tracking window until it finds the best matching pattern
in the target log. Experimental results demonstrate the
effectiveness of the proposed approach. Future work
will focus on improving the adaptiveness of the frame-
work to include logs with different depth resolutions.
Data and materials availability
Data associated with this research are confidential
and cannot be released.
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