MULTI-DIMENSIONAL SEISMIC DATA VISUALIZER

Our multidimensional data visualizer is actually a collection of CM/AVS networks built from many AVS and CM/AVS modules. We developed the following CM/AVS modules: Browser, Slicer, Gain, and Pan_Zoom. The visualizer is started by invoking a C-shell (CM_Slicer) and a particular network is selected by specifying parameters on the command line. Different networks may include different modules, and the modules may be in different order. For example, one of the command-line parameters is gain. If the user types gain=no on the command line, a CM/AVS network without gain modules is fired up. On the contrary, if gain=all the Gain module will proceed the Slicer modules, causing the whole dataset to be gained at once. Finally, if gain=every the Gain modules will follow the Slicer modules and the different slices will be gained independently.

Figure shows a example of CM/AVS network that can be started by invoking CM_Slicer. The network begins with a standard AVS module called file browser that is used for selecting the input file name, that must be a SEP header file. The file name is passed on to the Browser that reads from disk a subset of the dataset, as specified by the user. The data so loaded in memory are passed to three instances of the Slicer module that extracts two-dimensional slices out of the multi-dimensional dataset. Each of the three slices is then passed to a Gain module for interactive gain, then to a Pan_Zoom module, and finally the three images are merged together and displayed in one window by the standard AVS module image viewer. The image viewer module displays the slices in a flat view, but the same slices can be rendered in three dimensions by the geometry viewer AVS module, as we will show in the next section.

As an example to illustrate the application we visualize a marine 3-D prestack dataset with no cable feather; that is, a four-dimensional dataset. The data has 3 parallel lines with 501 shot gathers each. The gathers have 120 traces of 704 time samples each. The total size of the dataset is only about 500 Mbytes; therefore the whole dataset can be read and stored in the CM-5 memory without sub-sampling. Figure shows the window displaying a common-offset section, a shot gather, and a time slice extracted from the prestack dataset. In the remainder of this section we will describe in more detail the CM/AVS modules that we developed, and we will illustrate their user interfaces.

 

3d-sl-net
Figure 1 CM/AVS network for reading, windowing, slicing, and gaining a multi-dimensional seismic dataset. The module with cm at the end of the name run on the CM-5, the others are standard AVS modules running on a workstation.