Generating Seismic Horizon Using Multiple Seismic Attributes

Today’s 3-D seismic surveys usually contain hundreds of inline and crossline vertical seismic slices. Seismic interpreters usually need to spend weeks or even months for manually picking horizons on vertical seismic slices. Researchers have developed algorithms to accelerate horizon picking and most algorithms employ the seismic reflector’s dip as the input. However, the computed seismic reflector’s dip is usually inaccurate near and across the discontinuities in the seismic images. Note that the time samples which belong to the same horizon should have approximate similar seismic instantaneous phase values. We propose to automatically track the seismic horizon simultaneously considering the seismic reflector’s dip and instantaneous phase attributes. Our algorithm aims to achieve three objectives: 1) minimizing the difference between the dip computed using tracked horizon and seismic dip attribute, 2) minimizing the difference among instantaneous phase value of the time samples on the tracked horizon, and 3) the tracked horizon exactly passes through user-defined control points (seeds). A constrained conjugate least-square algorithm is employed to solve our optimization problem. The applications show that the tracked horizon which only uses dip attribute would “jump” from one seismic event to another seismic event near the unconformity zone. However, the horizon tracked using the proposed method strictly follows the same seismic event over the whole seismic survey.