Automatic fault surface detection by using 3D Hough transform

Detection of faults plays an important role in the characterization of reservoir regions. In this paper, we propose an automatic fault surface detection method using 3D Hough transform to improve the interpretation efficiency. We first highlight the likely fault points in seismic data by thresholding the corresponding discontinuity volumes. Then, we apply 3D Hough transform to detect the likely fault planes in seismic volumes. After filtering out the noisy planes, we apply the weighted plane fitting method to extract the smooth fault surfaces from the remaining fault planes. Experimental results show that the proposed method has the capability of detecting fault surfaces in real seismic data with high accuracy and fewer human interventions.