Volumetric fault image enhancement — Some applications

Abstract

The interpretation of faults on 3D seismic data is often aided by the use of geometric attributes such as coherence and curvature. Unfortunately, these same attributes also delineate stratigraphic boundaries (geologic signal) and apparent discontinuities due to cross-cutting seismic noise. Effective fault mapping thus requires enhancing piecewise continuous faults and suppressing stratabound edges and unconformities as well as seismic noise. To achieve this objective, we apply two passes of edge-preserving structure-oriented filtering followed by a recently developed fault enhancement algorithm based on a directional Laplacian of a Gaussian operator. We determine the effectiveness of this workflow on a 3D seismic volume from central British Columbia, Canada.