Facies recognition using a smoothing process through Fast Independent Component Analysis and Discrete Cosine Transform

• We apply Independent Component Analysis (ICA) to improve the classification of well-log data based on lithologies.
• We apply the Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) to denoise and to smooth the data.
• The DCT smoothing process helps to increase the success rate of prediction.

We propose a preprocessing methodology for well-log geophysical data based on Fast Independent Component Analysis (FastICA) and Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT), in order to improve the success rate of the K-NN automatic classifier. The K-NN have been commonly applied to facies recognition in well-log geophysical data for hydrocarbon reservoir modeling and characterization.The preprocess was made in two different levels. In the first level, a FastICA based dimenstion reduction was applied, maintaining much of the information, and its results were classified; In second level, FastICA and DCT were applied in smoothing level, where the data points are modified, so individual points have their distance reduced, keeping just the primordial information. The results were compared to identify the best classification cases. We have applied the proposed methodology to well-log data from a petroleum field of Campos Basin, Brazil. Sonic, gamma-ray, density, neutron porosity and deep induction logs were preprocessed with FastICA and DCT, and the product was classified with K-NN. The success rates in recognition were calculated by appling the method to log intervals where core data were available. The results were compared to those of automatic recognition of the original well-log data set with and without the removal of high frequency noise. We conclude that the application of the proposed methodology significantly improves the success rate of facies recognition by K-NN.