Image-Based Deep Learning Approach for Drilling Kick Risk Prediction

As oil and gas exploration and development advance into deep and ultra-deep areas, kick accidents are becoming more frequent during drilling operations, posing a serious threat to construction safety. Traditional kick monitoring methods are limited in their multivariate coupling modeling. These models rely too heavily on single-feature weights, making them prone to misjudgment. Therefore, this paper proposes a drilling kick risk prediction method based on image modality. First, a sliding window mechanism is used to slice key drilling parameters in time series to extract multivariate data for continuous time periods. Second, data processing is performed to construct joint logging curve image samples. Then, classical CNN models such as VGG16 and ResNet are used to train and classify image samples; finally, the performance of the model on a number of indicators is evaluated and compared with different CNN and temporal neural network models. Finally, the model’s performance is evaluated across multiple metrics and compared with CNN and time series neural network models of different structures. Experimental results show that the image-based VGG16 model outperforms typical convolutional neural network models such as AlexNet, ResNet, and EfficientNet in overall performance, and significantly outperforms LSTM and GRU time series models in classification accuracy and comprehensive discriminative power. Compared to LSTM, the recall rate increased by 23.8% and the precision increased by 5.8%, demonstrating that its convolutional structure possesses stronger perception and discriminative capabilities in extracting local spatiotemporal features and recognizing patterns, enabling more accurate identification of kick risks. Furthermore, the pre-trained VGG16 model achieved an 8.69% improvement in accuracy compared to the custom VGG16 model, fully demonstrating the effectiveness and generalization advantages of transfer learning in small-sample engineering problems and providing feasibility support for model deployment and engineering applications.