Noise suppression of time-migrated gathers using prestack structure-oriented filtering

Abstract

Prestack seismic analysis provides information on rock properties, lithology, fluid content, and the orientation and intensity of anisotropy. However, such analysis demands high-quality seismic data. Unfortunately, noise is always present in seismic data even after careful processing. Noise in the prestack gathers may not only contaminate the seismic image, thereby lowering the quality of seismic interpretation, but it may also bias the seismic prestack inversion for rock properties, such as acoustic- and shear-impedance estimation. Common postmigration data conditioning includes running window median and Radon filters that are applied to the flattened common reflection point gathers. We have combined filters across the offset and azimuth with edge-preserving filters along the structure to construct a true “5D” filter that preserves amplitude, thereby preconditioning the data for subsequent quantitative analysis. We have evaluated our workflow by applying it to a prestack seismic volume acquired over the Fort Worth Basin, TX. The inverted results from the noise-suppressed prestack gathers are more laterally continuous and have higher correlation with well logs when compared with those inverted from conventional time-migrated gathers.