Seismic fault preserving diffusion

This paper focuses on the denoising and enhancing of 3-D reflection seismic data. We propose a pre-processing step based on a non-linear diffusion filtering leading to a better detection of seismic faults. The non-linear diffusion approaches are based on the definition of a partial differential equation that allows us to simplify the images without blurring relevant details or discontinuities. Computing the structure tenser which provides information on the local orientation of the geological layers, we propose to drive the diffusion along these layers using a new approach called SFPD (Seismic Fault Preserving Diffiision). In SFPD, the eigenvalues of the tenser are fixed according to a confidence measure that takes into account the regularity of the local seismic structure. Results on both synthesized and real 3-D blocks show the efficiency of the proposed approach. (c) 2006 Elsevier B.V All rights reserved.