Automatic faults extraction using double hough transform

Abstract

Many different seismic attributes have been proposed so far in the literature to “mark” the presence of faults in a seismic cube. From these attributes, the challenge is now to extract, automatically, a fault network where each fault is singled out as a subset of points. For this purpose, we propose to use a method based on a cascade of two Hough transforms. The basic idea of this algorithm is that the intersection of a fault by a series of (x,z) cross sections is (approximately) a family of straight‐lines. Each of these straight‐lines is transformed into a point in a first parametric space thanks to a first Hough transform. For each fault, the set of points so obtained constitutes (approximately) a new straight‐line in the parametric space which is then transformed into a point of a second parametric space thanks to a new Hough transform. Reverse transformations allow then to rebuild each fault as a set of points.