Automatic seismic event tracking using a dynamic time warping algorithm

Abstract

For seismic data interpretation, horizon picking based on seismic events in stacked or migrated seismic sections is essential for obtaining information on subsurface structures. This conventional work is time-consuming via manual implementation. In this paper, we develop an automatic seismic event tracking method of horizon interpretation using the dynamic time warping (DTW) algorithm. The proposed method consists of two steps: calculating local time shifts between adjacent traces through a pilot trace and then event tracking. In the method, the DTW algorithm is applied to calculate time shifts between two adjacent traces, and an improved multitrace DTW strategy is proposed to improve the robustness. One synthetic seismic trace is used to demonstrate the DTW algorithm, and a synthetic seismic section is used to verify the feasibility of the proposed method handling contaminated seismic data with noise. Finally, we apply the method to a 3D physical model dataset. The result indicates that the proposed method is quantitatively feasible for seismic event automatic tracking and is reasonably stable for noisy seismic section flattening, which also has the potential to extract seismic horizon slices effectively.