Attribute‐driven footprint suppression

Abstract

Most land seismic data volumes suffer from acquisition footprint which can often be confused with faults, fractures, and karst. Geometric attributes such as coherence and curvature enhance the appearance of subtle geologic features, but also exacerbate footprint artifacts. We use this ‘negative’ feature of geometric attributes as a means of characterizing short‐wavelength footprint components. Once characterized, we subtract the footprint from the migrated seismic data volume using an adaptive subtraction technique and recompute attributes from these filtered data volumes. We demonstrate the effectiveness and pitfalls of this approach on a data volume exhibiting karst from the Central Basin Platform of west Texas,