High Resolution Adaptively Steered Horizon Tracker
Maryam Mahsal Khan, Aftab Alam · 2012
Automatic horizon tracking is an essential productivity tool for 3D seismic interpretation. Several methods are commercially available to perform this task. However, these methods fail in areas of rapidly changing structure or reflection character. Human intervention and editing in such situations slows the productivity. We propose an auto-tracker that adapts to variations of structure, changes in wavelet shape and statistics of signal amplitude. It tracks horizons as patches of constant dip where the patch extent varies according to the rate of change of dip. It allows a degree of change in wavelet shape within a patch, and adapts to change of amplitude according to local statistics. The dip steering function is the spatial gradient of continuous phase spectrum that is derived from a spectral decomposition technique known as Continuous Amplitude and Phase Spectrum ‘CAPS’. The techniquecomputes Fourier Transform of a short-time signal with high frequency resolution. The proposed approach is applied to real 3D seismic volumes from spatially varying structures and changing signal shapes and amplitudes. The auto-tracker successfully steered across the changing structures and varying amplitudes to pick horizons.