Detection of salt-dome boundary surfaces in migrated seismic volumes using gradient of textures

Salt domes, an important geological structure, are closely related to the formation of petroleum reservoirs. In many cases, no explicit strong reflector exists between a salt dome and neighboring geological structures. Therefore, interpreters commonly delineate the boundaries of salt domes by observing a change in texture content. To stimulate the visual interpretation process, we propose a novel seismic attribute, the gradient of textures, which can quantify texture variations in three-dimensional (3D) space. On the basis of the attribute volume, we apply a global threshold to highlight regions containing salt-dome boundaries. In addition, with region growing and morphological operations, we can remove noisy boundaries and detect the boundary surfaces of salt domes effectively and efficiently. Experimental results show that by utilizing the strong coherence between neighboring seismic sections, the proposed method can delineate the surfaces of salt-dome boundaries more accurately than the state-of-the-art detection methods that label salt-dome boundaries only in two-dimensional (2D) seismic sections.