Seismic Reflection Interpretation as an Image Understanding Problem

Seismic interpretation is modelled as an image-understanding problem solved by means of low-level and high-level perceptual activities. The former extract from the data features semantically relevant in the geological domain, the latter give an explicit and meaningful description of subsurface objects. The Horizons prototype from seismic stratigraphic interpretation was designed and implemented on these grounds. The low-level tasks solved are extraction of geometric primitives: reflectors, areas with homogeneous texture. The high-level tasks are the recognition of basic geometric configurations of seismic sequences. To support these activities, a set of representations of the data with different levels of detail and abstraction has been defined, as well as the procedures to build them. The basic knowledge consists of a set of geological archetypes representing the properties of the known seismic sequences. We adopt a hybrid interpretative strategy based on data-driven extraction of primitives and on model-driven matching of archetypes with data.