Constrained simultaneous automatic picking for VVAZ analysis
Yi Tao, Michael Davidson, Herbert W. Swan, Sergey B. Fomel, Jeff Malloy, Jack Howell, Stephen K. Chiu, Robert Olson · 2012
Detecting anisotropy from surface seismic data may be useful to detect and characterize stress or fractures in the subsurface. With wide-azimuth data, the velocity or travel time variation with azimuth (VVAZ) information can be used to detect horizontal transverse isotropy (HTI) parameters. Orthogonal residual slowness scan may be a robust method for performing VVAZ analysis. However, simultaneous automatically picking of 5-D semblance volumes (3-D volumes at each common depth point (CDP) location) remains a challenge. By defining the semblance as a variational integral over time, this auto-picking problem can be analogous to ray-tracing problem. When multi-parameter constraints are considered, such auto picking algorithm can provide efficient and effective estimates of residual slowness from semblance volumes.