Seismic Tiles, a data format to facilitate analytics on seismic reflectors

Abstract

Seismic Tiles is a new concept for representing seismic reflectors and attributes derived from seismic data, which makes it easy to automate seismic interpretation and analysis in general. Many subsurface problems can now be solved mostly automatically by computers, instead of mostly manually by humans, enabling the disruption of seismic interpretation at a scale similar to the disruption of road navigation facilitated by the closely analogous Google Map-style data structure. Some examples where this has been successfully implemented include screening for amplitude-variation-with-offset anomalies to identify prospects, automatic characterization of 4D effects according to rock physics modeling, and identifying faults and horizons verified by structural logic. Automation takes place not via machine learning but by direct and transparent application of well-known geophysical and geologic logic. This is achieved by automatically detecting all reflectors in the seismic data set and representing them by a set of tiles, which are small rectangular surfaces typically 200 m × 200 m in size. Tiles are calculated on a regular grid in lateral coordinates via a local 3D linear Radon transform. A set of tiles combine to describe a reflector surface, similar to how tiles in a bathroom combine to describe the walls and floor. Any attribute, from any seismic cube or other data sets, can be automatically extracted and assigned to the tiles and thus used in the logic. This logic can include the geometry of the tile itself and how it relates to tiles in the neighborhood, thus allowing easy implementation of any kind of interpretation logic that involves seismic reflectors. As the tile geometry and attributes are exposed to man and machine in a simple tabular data format, implementing logic using Seismic Tiles is easy, and much easier than applying logic directly on input in the form of raw seismic data.