Interpreter Guidance for Automated Seismic Image Segmentation

While automatic segmentation of seismic images can dramatically speed up interpretation of salt bodies and alleviate a major model-building bottleneck, human expertise at this task is valuable and should be included. Here, we demonstrate a strategy to incorporate such expertise into the highly-efficient Pairwise Region Comparison (PRC) segmentation algorithm. By supplying a limited manual interpretation of the salt boundary, interpreters can correct local inaccuracies and guide the automatic result in both 2D and 3D. In the 3D case, accuracy of the segmentation improves even in areas far from the manual picks. Examples from a wide-azimuth Gulf of Mexico survey demonstrate the effectiveness of this procedure.