Automatic Feature Highlighting in Noisy RES Data With CycleGAN

Radio echo sounding (RES) is a common technique used in subsurface glacial imaging, which provides insight into the underlying rock and ice. However, systematic noise is introduced into the data during collection, complicating interpretation of the results. Researchers most often use a combination of manual interpretation and filtering techniques to denoise data; however, these processes are time intensive and inconsistent. Fully Convolutional Networks have been proposed as an automated alternative to identify layer boundaries in radargrams. However, they require high-quality manually processed training data and struggle to interpolate data in noisy samples (Varshney et al. 2020). Herein, the authors propose a GAN based model to interpolate layer boundaries through noise and highlight layers in two-dimensional glacial RES data. In real-world noisy images, filtering often results in loss of data such that interpolating layer boundaries is nearly impossible. Furthermore, traditional machine learning approaches are not suited to this task because of the lack of paired data, so we employ an unpaired image-to-image translation model. For this model, we create a synthetic dataset to represent the domain of images with clear, highlighted layers and use an existing real-world RES dataset as our noisy domain. We implement a CycleGAN trained on these two domains to highlight layers in noisy images that can interpolate effectively without significant loss of structure or fidelity. Though the current implementation is not a perfect solution, the model clearly highlights layers in noisy data and allows researchers to determine layer size and position without mathematical filtering, manual processing, or ground-truth images for training. This is significant because clean images generated by our model enable subsurface researchers to determine glacial layer thickness more efficiently.