A General-Purpose Diversified 2D Seismic Image Dataset from NAMSS

TL;DR

The Unicamp-NAMSS dataset offers a large, diverse collection of 2D seismic images from multiple regions, supporting advanced machine learning research in geophysics by enabling robust training, validation, and generalization studies.

Contribution

This paper introduces the Unicamp-NAMSS dataset, a comprehensive, region-disjoint seismic dataset designed to facilitate machine learning research in geophysics with extensive variability and broad coverage.

Findings

Dataset covers diverse geological and acquisition conditions.

Analyses show high variability within and across regions.

Compared to existing datasets, it offers broader seismic appearance coverage.

Abstract

We introduce the Unicamp-NAMSS dataset, a large, diverse, and geographically distributed collection of migrated 2D seismic sections designed to support modern machine learning research in geophysics. We constructed the dataset from the National Archive of Marine Seismic Surveys (NAMSS), which contains decades of publicly available marine seismic data acquired across multiple regions, acquisition conditions, and geological settings. After a comprehensive collection and filtering process, we obtained 2588 cleaned and standardized seismic sections from 122 survey areas, covering a wide range of vertical and horizontal sampling characteristics. To ensure reliable experimentation, we balanced the dataset so that no survey dominates the distribution, and partitioned it into non-overlapping macro-regions for training, validation, and testing. This region-disjoint split allows robust evaluation of generalization to unseen geological and acquisition conditions. We validated the dataset through quantitative and embedding-space analyses using both convolutional and transformer-based models. These analyses showed that Unicamp-NAMSS exhibits substantial variability within and across regions, while maintaining coherent structure across acquisition macro-region and survey types. Comparisons with widely used interpretation datasets (Parihaka and F3 Block) further demonstrated that Unicamp-NAMSS covers a broader portion of the seismic appearance space, making it a strong candidate for machine learning model pretraining. The dataset, therefore, provides a valuable resource for machine learning tasks, including self-supervised representation learning, transfer learning, benchmarking supervised tasks such as super-resolution or attribute prediction, and studying domain adaptation in seismic interpretation.