Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), as most popular artificial intelligence models in the current image generation field, have excellent image generation capabilities. Based on Wasserstein GANs with gradient penalty, this paper proposes a novel digital core reconstruction method. First, a convolutional neural network is used as a generative network to learn the distribution of real shale samples, and then a convolutional neural network is constructed as a discriminative network to distinguish reconstructed shale samples from real ones. Through this confrontation training method, realistic digital core samples of shale can be reconstructed. The paper uses two-point covariance function, Frechet Inception Distance and Kernel Inception Distance, to evaluate the quality of digital core samples of shale reconstructed by GANs. The results show that the covariance function can test the similarity between generated and real shale samples, and that GANs can efficiently reconstruct digital core samples of shale with high-quality. Compared with multiple point statistics, the new method does not require prior inference of the probability distribution of the training data, and directly uses noise vector to generate digital core samples of shale without using constraints of "hard data" in advance. It is easy to produce an unlimited number of new samples. Furthermore, the training time is also shorter, only 4 hours in this paper. Therefore, the new method has some good points compared with current methods.Cited as: Zha, W., Li, X., Xing, Y., He, L., Li, D. Reconstruction of shale image based on Wasserstein Generative Adversarial Networks with gradient penalty. Advances in Geo-Energy Research, 2020, 4(1): 107-114, doi: 10.26804/ager.2020.01.1
