Method for determining ichnological subsurface geologic formation

A method of determining an ichnological classification of subsurface geological images, comprising:

• collecting a geological image from a subsurface core,
• receiving the geological image with a computing device having circuitry including a memory storing program instructions and one or more processors configured to perform the program instructions;
• formatting, by the computing device, the geological image to generate a formatted geological image;
• applying the formatted geological image to a deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) trained to classify bioturbation indices;
• and
• matching, by a classifier of the DCNN, the formatted geological image to a bioturbation index class,
• wherein the DCNN is trained on a training set of geological images pre-labeled with bioturbation indices and classifies the training set into bioturbation index classes,
• wherein each geological image of the training set is a 224×224 pixel, three channel image, wherein the three channels comprise a red channel, a blue channel and a green channel, and each geological image of the training set has low-level features including lines, edges and dots and high level features including objects,
• applying the formatted geological image to a series of 3×3 convolution filters, wherein each convolution filter generates a set of weights;
• freezing the weights of a first portion of the series of 3×3 convolution filters;
• training, using the training set, the weights of a second portion of the series of 3×3 convolution filters;
• and
• recognizing, by the DCNN, the objects.