Enhanced interpreter-aided salt-boundary extraction using shape deformation

Enhanced interpreter-aided salt-boundary extraction using shape deformation

Yang Zhang and Adam D. Halpert

Abstract:

In many marine seismic exploration projects, precise interpretation of the salt-body geometry (which is also called “salt-body segmentation”) is a key component of building the subsurface velocity model. However, segmentation of salt is very human-intensive, even with the help of currently available semi-automatic computer software. This paper addresses the problem of automatically and accurately tracking the salt boundary in a series of neighboring seismic image slices, given an accurate salt segmentation for only one single reference slice. (The reference segmentation can be done manually). We achieve this using a landmark-based shape deformation technique plus SVM (Support Vector Machine) style regression. An example on a 3-D Gulf of Mexico data set demonstrates the effectiveness of our approach.