Emerging and future trends in seismic attributes

Seismic attributes extract information from seismic reflection data that can be used for quantitative and qualitative interpretation. Attributes are used by geologists, geophysicists, and petrophysicists to map features from basin to reservoir scale. Some attributes, such as seismic amplitude, envelope, rms amplitude, spectral magnitude, acoustic impedance, elastic impedance, and AVO are directly sensitive to changes in seismic impedance. Other attributes such as peak-to-trough thickness, peak frequency, and bandwidth are sensitive to layer thicknesses. Both classes of attributes can be quantitatively correlated to well control using multivariate analysis, geostatistics, or neural networks. Seismic attributes such as coherence, Sobel filter-based edge detectors, amplitude gradients, dip-azimuth, curvature, and gray-level co-occurrence matrix measures are directly sensitive to seismic textures and morphology. Geologic models of deposition and structural deformation coupled with seismic stratigraphy princip...