Simultaneous Structure Enhancing Filtering and Fault Detection Using Plane Wave Prediction

Plane wave destruction (PWD) is a robust algorithm to calculate local slope of seismic data, which can be used to predict each trace from its neighbor traces in order to create a flattened third dimension. This dimension extension approach is called plane wave prediction. The structure enhancing filtering applies a robust non-linear filter in the added third dimension in order to obtain a structure-preserved and signal-enhanced data in the original time-space domain. We propose to use the structure enhancing filtered data as the reference profile to calculate the predictive coherency in a faults-detection framework. Thus, we can simultaneously filter the data and detect unconformities information after the plane-wave prediction step. Synthetic and field data examples show that the proposed approach works efficiently and the detected structures are clearer than the conventional predictive-coherency approach.