Phase and the Hilbert transform

Abstract

The concept of phase permeates seismic data processing and signal processing in general, but it can be awkward to understand, and manipulating it directly can lead to surprising results. It doesn't help that the word phase is used to mean a variety of things, depending on whether we refer to the propagating wavelet, the observed wavelet, poststack seismic attributes, or an entire seismic data set. Several publications have discussed the concepts and ambiguities (e.g., Roden and Sepúlveda, 1999 ; Liner, 2002 ; Simm and White, 2002 ).