Automatic Extraction of Seismic Data Horizon Across Faults

Most of the traditional horizon interpretation methods are based on the dip of the seismic data. Since the dip does not correctly reflect the discontinuous reflection characteristics of the events, these methods usually cannot extract the horizons containing faults well. Meanwhile, the field seismic data observed in complex areas are generally with low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), which makes the extraction of horizons difficult. To address these problems, an automatic horizon extraction approach under fault control is investigated in this article. First, the horizon dip is obtained by using plane wave destruction (PWD), and the dip information can be utilized to control the overall trend of the horizon curve. Based on the dip information, we can also calculate the weight coefficients to characterize the faults. The fault characterization results can better guide the horizon extraction. Then, the dynamic time warping (DTW) is used for phase matching to further obtain the similar slope and describe the details of the horizontal curve. Finally, the horizon extraction equation is developed with the dip and phase information as the guide and solved iteratively to obtain the final horizon curve. The effectiveness of the presented approach is tested by both synthetic and field data. The results demonstrate that the presented approach can accurately pick the horizon information across faults and is more stable in the condition of low SNR compared with previous methods.