Conventional pattern recognition methods directly use 1D poststack data or 2D prestack data for the statistical pattern recognition of fault and fracture network, thereby ignoring the spatial structure information in 3D seismic data. As a result, the generated fault and fracture network is not distinguishable and has poor continuity. In this paper, a fault and fracture network characterization method based on 3D convolutional autoencoder is proposed. First, in the autoencoder training frame, 3D prestack data are used as input, and the 3D convolution operation is used to mine the spatial structure information to the maximum and gradually reduce the spatial dimension of the input. Then, the residual network is used to recover the input’s details and the corresponding spatial dimension. Lastly, the hidden features extracted by the encoders are recognized via k -means, SOM, and two-step clustering analysis. The validity of the method is verified by testing the seismic simulation data and applying real seismic data. The 3D convolution can directly process the seismic data and maximize the prestack texture attributes and spatial structure information provided by 3D seismic data without dimensionality reduction and other preprocessing operations. The interleaving convolution layer and residual block overcome low learning and accuracy rates due to the deepening of networks.