A texture-based interpretation workflow with application to delineating salt domes

In this paper, we propose a texture-based interpretation workflow and apply to delineate salt domes in 3D migrated seismic volumes. First, we compute an attribute map using a novel seismic attribute, three-dimensional gradient of textures (3D-GoT), which measures the dissimilarity between neighboring cubes around each voxel in seismic volume across time or depth, crossline, and inline directions. To evaluate the texture dissimilarity, we introduce five three-dimensional perceptual and non-perceptual dissimilarity functions. Second, we apply a global threshold on the 3D-GoT volume to yield a binary volume and demonstrate its effects on salt dome delineation using objective evaluation measures such as receiver operating characteristics (ROC) curves and area under the curves (AUC). Third, with an initial seed point selected inside the binary volume, we utilize 3D region growing to capture a salt body. For automated 3D region growing, we propose a tensor-based automatic seed point selection method. Finally, we apply morphological post-processing to delineate the salt dome within the seismic volume. Furthermore, we also propose an objective evaluation measure based on the curvature and shape to compute the similarity between detected salt-dome boundaries and the reference interpreted by the geophysicist. The experimental results on a real dataset from the North Sea show that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods for salt dome delineation.