A Review on Intelligent Recognition with Logging Data: Tasks, Current Status and Challenges

Geophysical logging series are valuable geological data that record the physical and chemical information of borehole walls and in-situ formations, and are widely used by geologists for interpreting geological problems due to their continuity, high resolution, and ease of access. Recently, machine learning methods are gradually bringing data science and geoscience closer together, and Intelligent Recognition using Logging Data (IRLD) is increasingly becoming an important interpretation task. However, due to the specificity of geological information, relatively low data quality makes the direct application of machine learning models to IRLD often not optimal. And to the best of our knowledge, IRLDs are not highly generalizable and technical surveys are still lacking. Therefore, this paper presents a comprehensive review of IRLD. Specifically, after systematically reviewing geophysical well logging and machine learning techniques, the main applications and general processes for the cross-discipline task of IRLD are summarized. More importantly, the key challenges of IRLD in the four stages of data acquisition, feature engineering, model building, and practical application are discussed in this review. The potential risks of these challenges are visualized by using real logging data from a study area in the South China Sea and the example of a lithology identification task. For these challenges, we give the current state-of-the-art methods and feasible strategies in conjunction with published research. This comprehensive review is expected to provide insights for practitioners to construct more robust models and achieve more effective application results in IRLD.