Frequency Enhancements for Visualizing 3D Seismic Data

This application paper introduces a suite of enhancement techniques for visualizing seismic data. These techniques provide a better understanding of the underlying propagation process in the complex time-dependent seismic data. Traditional techniques using the accumulated displacement as a scalar or vector field for volume rendering fail to capture the dynamic frequency variations, which is essential for seismic study. We show that using multiband signal filters to separate frequency components of the data can highlight different frequency bands explicitly in visualization. The end result is a combination of different displacements, such as drift and shaking along the horizontal and vertical directions which are perturbing the accumulated drifts. We have implemented a GPU-based raycasting renderer to handle unstructured meshes. We also employ deformable textures for effectively composing multiple frequency components. Our analysis and visualization techniques provide a new way for seismic scientists to study their data.