Hybrid Dip Estimation

Dip estimation is fundamental step in seismic interpretation, and is often used to guide seismic attributes calculation such as smoothing and edge detection. However, estimating dip accurately is a fairly compute intensive task that can slow down calculations of attributes considerably. Here we compare two established and robust methods for calculating dip, and one simpler and faster but less accurate method with regards to dip field detail, consistency, robustness and compute time. As the fast but less accurate dip estimation method gives good dip estimates in most cases, but suffers from producing some outliers, we propose a dip estimation method that is a hybrid between the fast method and a more robust but slower method. By re-estimating any extreme dips with a robust method, we demonstrate that a hybrid method can produce a dip-field of similar detail and quality as the best robust method in significantly less computation time.