We present an application of a singular value decomposition (SVD) filtering approach to the automatic detection of seismic horizons. The SVD filtering approach may be seen as a multichannel filtering method where each filtered seismic trace retains the coherence of the neighbouring seismic traces. The SVD filtering preserves the amplitude and phase relations and reinforces the spacial correlation between seismic events, and at the same time it reduces the incoherent noise in data, which normally is associated to the last eigenvalues. The SVD decomposition is performed on each subset of traces around each trace of the original 2D or 3D seismic data. The filtered trace is obtained from the most important eigenvalues and eigenvectors. We illustrate the application of the new approach on 3D post-stack land seismic data. The improvement of the resultant coherence in the seismic reflected events allows for greater autotracking robustness during the automatic interpretation of the seismic horizons. The SVD filtering approach is computationally efficient and improves significantly the coherence, the consistency and the spacial continuity of the seismic events making easier the automatic detection of the commercial software in the search for patterns along the autotracking process.
automatic mapping of horizons; seismic processing; SVD filtering; tracking horizons seismic
