Automatic Extraction of Fault Surfaces from Three-Dimensional Seismic Data

Stein Inge Pedersen*, Trygve Randen, Lars Snneland, Schlumberger Stavanger Research, yvind Steen, Statoil
Summary A novel fault extraction procedure for 3D seismic is presented. The procedure consists of three steps. The first step enhances the spatial discontinuities in the seismic data (fault attribute generation). The second step significantly improves the fault attributes by suppressing noise and remains of non-faulting events. This is achieved by the cooperative behavior of thousands of artificial ants. The advantages with this method will be demonstrated. In particular, the faults can be split into different nonintersecting sub-systems. These sub-systems ease the extraction of fault surfaces in the third step of the process.
Figure 1 illustrates the automatic fault interpretation sequence. One or several fault enhancing attributes are produced. These attributes might also contain artifacts due to noise, residual responses from reflector interfaces, etc, making it more difficult to map the faults. In order to prepare these attributes for surface extraction, conditioning of the attributes is performed using a novel, patentpending approach named Ant Tracking. Some fault attributes are described in this paper, but in general, any fault-enhancing attribute, or combinations of attributes, can be applied in the workflow.

Fault enhancing attributes Enhancing faults means enhancing discontinuities in the seismic data. This is, however, not straightforward, as the intersections between the different reflection layers constitute great amplitude changes. Hence, we need to enhance changes along the reflection layers and not orthogonal to them. In order to obtain this, some attributes use a local dip estimate of the reflection layers. A detailed description is given in a recent paper [3]. The Chaos attribute (refer to [3]) follows from analyzing the dominating orientation in each point of the seismic cube. An estimate of the dominating orientation is obtained by principal component analysis of the point gradient. Figure 2 illustrates three situations which are distinguishable by studying the value of the eigenvalues resulting from the principal component analysis, { max , mid , min }. Calculating the ratio between mid , min , and max , allows us to detect discontinuities.

Introduction Interpretation of faults is today most commonly a manual task where the interpreter draws faults on top of seismic images. This is time consuming and difficult to do accurately. Automatic extraction of the fault surfaces would allow user-interaction at a higher level, where the interpreter can spend time trying to understand the fault network and make selections among the extracted surfaces instead of having to create the surfaces.

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Figure 2 (a) A smooth reflector will have one dominating direction ( max >> mid min ). (b) A bent reflector will have (d) Figure 1 An attribute cube (b) is generated from the seismic cube (a). Conditioning by Ant Tracking is applied, and from the resulting cube (c), the fault surfaces are extracted as separate objects (d). two strong directions ( max mid >> min ). (c) A fault with a damage zone will have gradients pointing in all directions ( max mid min ).

Automatic Extraction of Fault Surfaces from Three-Dimensional Seismic Data

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Figure 5 Edge enhanced cube generated from the seismic cube shown in Figure 3 (a).

(a) Seismic cube. (b) Chaos cube generated from (a).

The Edge enhancement attribute uses a local dip estimate to detect only changes occouring along the reflection layers. The local dip estimate represents a plane, and by projecting the vector with the derivatives onto this plane, changes which are nearly perpendicular to the reflector will produce vectors with small magnitudes, whereas changes in the direction of the reflector will produce vectors with larger magnitudes.

The Variance attribute uses the local variance as a measure of signal unconformity. For each voxel, the local variance is computed from horizontal sub-slices. If this slice is within an unbroken reflection layer, the amplitude variance will be small whereas amplitude changes due to a fault will result in a larger variance. Next, the variance estiamte is smoothed by a vertical window and amplitude normalized. The variance attribute may furthermore be done dip insensitive by performing the variance estimation in dip corrected slices (flow surfaces).For more details on the variance attribute, refer to [2].

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Figure 4 Illustration of the concept of dip guided edge enhancement. (a) Derivatives indicating change along the reflector produces a projection with large magnitude in the dip plane, whereas (b) derivatives indicating change orthogonal to the reflector projects as a vector with small magnitude in the dip plane.

This attribute does not introduce artifacts by smoothing and picks up very small amplitude changes (dimming effects of sub-seismic resolution faults). Hence, even very subtle faults, which are very hard to visually detect from the seismic data, are captured. This property often makes it the preferred attribute for fault extraction. Figure 5 shows an example of an edge enhanced cube.

Figure 6 Variance cube generated from the seismic cube shown in Figure 3 (a).

Attribute conditioning by Ant Tracking Extraction of surfaces from fault attributes is nontrivial due to the noisy nature of these attributes. The surfaces usually appear more like trends than well-defined, continuous surfaces. In the conditioning step the signal to noise characteristics of the attribute set is improved, retaining

Automatic Extraction of Fault Surfaces from Three-Dimensional Seismic Data

only continuous and desired fault features. This is achieved by using the principles of swarm intelligence. Swarm intelligence [4] is a term describing the collective behavior that emerges from a group of social insects. An example is how ants find the shortest path between the nest and a food source by communicating via pheromone, a chemical substance that attracts other ants. Figure 7 illustrates how the shortest path is found.

have been removed and how the fault surfaces have been made sharper and more continuous.

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Figure 7 (a) Two ants start at the same time at the nest. (b) The ant choosing the shorter path will arrive at the nest before the ant choosing the longer path. The shorter path will thus be marked with more pheromone than the longer path, and hence the next ant is more likely to choose the shorter path

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By encoding fault properties expectations as behavior of intelligent software agents, we are able to enhance and extract fault-like responses in the attribute. An agent will act very similar to an ant in the foraging situation described above, by making decisions based on its pre-coded behavior and emitting electronic pheromone along its trail. The idea is to distribute a large number of agents in the volume, and let each agent move along what appears to be a fault surface while emitting pheromone. Agents deployed at points where there is no surface, only unstructured noise, or where there is a surface which does not fulfill the conditions for a fault (e.g. remains of a reflector), will be terminated shortly or immediately after their deployment. Agents deployed on a fault, on the other hand, should be able to trace the fault surface for a while upon being terminated. We expect that surfaces fulfilling our expectations for faults will be traced by many agents deployed at different positions in the volume, and hence be strongly marked by pheromone. Noise and surfaces unlikely to be faults should be unmarked or weakly marked, in which situation they will be removed by thresholding. Figure 8 shows some results from applying Ant Tracking to fault attributes. Note how chaotic responses in the attributes

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Figure 8 (a) Time slice of a fault attribute (Variance) with corresponding Ant Track results (b). Inline section of attribute (Fault Edge) with (d) Ant Track results.

The agents make an orientation estimate of the surfaces they are tracing. This estimate is stored along with the extracted surface, and it is hence possible to filter the results on angles. That is, one may split the result into separate fault systems. If there is, due to some processing artifacts, coherent noise in the data appearing at some angles, the surfaces having these angles may be switched off and the noise hence removed from the result. Other surface properties, like e.g. average amplitude of the input attribute along the surface, are also stored allowing separation of faults on how strongly they are supported in the input attribute. The Ant Track results used to condition attributes differs from other attributes by allowing the interpreter to tune the results after processing. We often refer to it as being a dynamic attribute.

Automatic Extraction of Fault Surfaces from Three-Dimensional Seismic Data

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Figure 10 The automatically extracted fault surfaces are written to the database as interpretation data. Here visualized on a 2D section (a) and a 3D cube (b).

Summary and conclusions

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Figure 9 The Ant Track result can be split up into separate fault systems, i.e. faults having the same strike and dip, here illustrated by splitting on strike. This has practical application for studying the results in 2D viewers. Faults parallel to the angle of view will appear as blurred regions in the image, masking details (b). Switching off these faults results in a cleaner image where the relevant faults and detail can be studied (c). The vertical features between the two leftmost faults in (b) and (c) may be artifacts, and can be switched off as well (d).

In this paper, we have presented the steps in a method for performing fully automatic fault interpretation. We use fault enhancing attributes to detect faults. The attributes have different properties and which attribute to choose is usually data dependent. If a very detailed interpretation is desired, the edge enhanced attribute is usually the preferred attribute. Applying Ant Tracking to fault attributes will enhance the desired fault characteristics. This significantly improves their visual appearances and brings out details hidden in the attributes by noise and poor responses. All the extracted surfaces are not necessarily faults. They may be changes in texture, like the e.g. the boundary of a gas cloud or a channel. The interpreter will hence have to validate and make selections among the extracted surfaces. Acknowledgements This work has been partially funded by The Research Council f Norway under the Demo 2000 programme. We wish to thank Statoil for the permission to publish data. References [1] T. Randen, PCT Patent Application No PCT/IB99/01040 AUTOMATED STRATIGRAPHIC AND FAULT INTERPRETATION 14.0110/0151 P. Van Bemmel, R. Pepper, Seismic signal processing method and apparatus for generating a cube of variance values, Patent US06151555 T. Randen, E. Monsen, et al. , Three-Dimensional Texture Attributes for Seismic Data Analysis, Ann. Int. Mtg., Soc. Expl. Geophys., Exp. Abstr, 2000. E. Bonbeau, G. Theraulaz, Swarm Smarts, Scientific American, March, 2000

Surface extraction The surfaces extracted in the Ant Tracking process are typically not complete fault surfaces, but surface segments . The last step of our fault extraction procedure is to extract each fault, which is comprised of several fault segments, as one surface. As is illustrated in Figure 9 (a), the faults can be split into separate systems defined by their orientations. By splitting the fault segments into parallel or nearly parallel sets, no segments are intersecting. After performing a thinning operation, each surface will be only one voxel thick. The surfaces are then easily extracted as connected components and written to the database as interpretation data.

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