Geophysical data registration using modified plane-wave destruction filters

I propose a method to efficiently measure local shifts, slopes, and scaling functions between seismic traces using modified plane-wave destruction filters. Plane-wave destruction can efficiently measure shifts of less than a few samples, making this algorithm particularly effective for detecting small shifts. When shifts are large, amplitude-adjusted plane-wave destruction can also be used to refine shift estimates obtained by other methods.

Amplitude-adjusted plane-wave destruction separates estimation of local shifts and amplitude weights, allowing the time-shift to be measured more accurately. This algorithm has clear applications to geophysical data registration problems, including time-lapse image registration, multicomponent image registration, automatic gather flattening, automatic seismic-well ties, and image merging. The effectiveness of this algorithm in predicting shifts associated with fluid migration, wave mode conversions, and anisotropy and amplitude gradients associated with amplitude variations with offset or angle is demonstrated by applying the algorithm to a synthetic trace, a time-lapse field data example from the Cranfield CO₂ sequestration project, a multicomponent field data example from West Texas, and the Mobil AVO prestack seismic data.

Finding correspondence between different parts of the same dataset falls into the same category of problems as local shift estimation. Computation of structure-oriented amplitude gradients for attribute-assisted interpretation requires the estimation of local slopes by correlating reflections between neighboring seismic traces in an image. One of the major challenges of interpreting seismic images is the delineation of reflection discontinuities that are related to geologic features, such as faults, channels, salt boundaries, and unconformities. Visually prominent reflection features often overshadow these subtle discontinuous features which are critical to understanding the structural and depositional environment of the subsurface. For this reason, precise manual interpretation of these reflection discontinuities in seismic images can be tedious and time-consuming, especially when data quality is poor. Discontinuity enhancement attributes are commonly used to facilitate the interpretation process by enhancing edges in seismic images and providing a quantitative measure of the significance of discontinuous features. These attributes require careful pre-processing to maintain geologic features and suppress acquisition and processing artifacts which may be artificially detected as a geologic edge.

The plane-wave Sobel filter cascades plane-wave destruction filters with plane-wave shaping in the transverse direction to compute an enhanced discontinuity attribute. The plane-wave Sobel attribute can be applied directly to a seismic image to efficiently and effectively enhance discontinuous features, or to a coherence image to create a sharper and more detailed image. I demonstrate the effectiveness of this method by applying it to two field data sets from offshore New Zealand and offshore Nova Scotia with several faults and channel features and compare the results to other coherence attributes.