AUTOMATIC DETECTION AND EXTRACTION OF FAULTS FROM THREE-

DIMENSIONAL SEISMIC DATA

Trygve Randen, Stein Inge Pedersen, and Lars Sønneland

Schlumberger Stavanger Research, P.O. Box 8013, 4068 Stavanger, Norway

trygve.randen@slb.com, stein.inge.pedersen@slb.com, lars.sonneland@slb.com

ABSTRACT surfaces as separate objects. In the following, the steps

of this procedure will be discussed.
Interpretation of faults in seismic data is today a time
consuming manual task. A new method for automatic ex-
traction of fault surfaces from conditioned fault enhanc-
ing attributes is presented. The backbone of this process
is formed by the attribute set chosen. Attributes well
suited for fault detection and enhancement will be de-
fined and procedures for fault surface extraction ex-
plained. A case study of automatically interpreted fault
surfaces will be shown.
(a) (b) (c)
INTRODUCTION

Reducing time from exploration to production of an oil-

field has great economical benefits. Oil companies have
suggested that for each 6 months saved, 5 % of the total
costs of the development of the oilfield is saved. In the
exploration phase, some of the most time consuming
tasks involves the geological interpretation of seismic
data. This is today done manually by interpreters, and (d)
much time could be saved by automating these tasks.
This paper will focus fault interpretation. Figure 1 An attribute cube (b) is generated from
The mapping of the fault network is of key importance in the seismic cube (a). The attribute is then condi-
reservoir characterization. The objectives for the fault in- tioned, and from the resulting cube (c), the fault
terpretation is partly dependent on which phase of a res- surfaces are extracted as separate objects (d).
ervoir’s life-cycle the interpreters are dealing with. The
exploration geologist is mostly interested in the large
faults, i.e. faults with significant offsets, for identifying
possible traps and getting an impression of the geologi- FAULT ENHANCING ATTRIBUTES
cal history of the area of interest. In reservoir engineer-
ing, subtle faults may also be of key importance. A fault Enhancing faults means enhancing discontinuities in the
may be sealing or conducting, i.e. it may prevent or allow seismic data. This is, however, not straightforward, as the
flow across or along the fault network. Detailed knowl- intersections between the different reflection layers con-
edge of the fault system may thus provide valuable in- stitute great amplitude changes. Hence, we need to en-
formation on where to place a well so that flow in the res- hance changes along the reflection layers and not or-
ervoir is optimized. thogonal to them. In order to obtain this, some attributes
use a local dip estimate of the reflection layers. A detailed
Figure 1 illustrates the steps in the automatic fault inter-
description is given in a recent paper [2].
pretation process. An interpreter would traditionally in-
spect the seismic cube and map faults where the reflec-
tion layers are broken and shifted. In computer vision, Dip and azimuth estimate
however, this does typically not provide a feasible input
for surface extraction. The first step is to create an attrib- The normal of a point on the reflection layer can be found
ute cube capturing the faults by locally having high en- by calculating the gradient in that point,
ergy along the fault surfaces and low energy otherwise.
The resulting attribute cube will subsequently be condi-
tioned in order to enable extraction of the high energy
  ∂x(t1, t 2, t3 ) 
 
 dt1 
 ∂x(t , t , t ) 
∇ x(t1, t 2 , t3) =  1 2 3 ,
 dt 2 
 ∂x(t , t , t )  (a) (b) (c)
 1 2 3 
 dt3  Figure 3 (a) A smooth reflector will have one
 
dominating direction ( λmax >> λmid ≈ λmin ). (b) A
with one partial derivative for each dimension. As illus- bent reflector will have two strong directions
trated in Figure 2, there may be large variations in the ( λmax ≈ λmid >> λmin ). (c) A fault with a damage
gradient estimates. From these variations the dominating zone will have gradients pointing in all directions
orientation is computed by using principal component ( λmax ≈ λmid ≈ λmin ).
analysis.
The chaos attribute will not only enhance faults but also
chaotic textures within the seismic ( carbonate reefs,
channels, gas chimneys, etc). It can be tuned specifically
for fault detection by taking the elongated, more or less
vertical nature of faults into consideration. By estimating
the chaos attribute within elongated vertical windows, or
dip guided windows orthogonal to the dominating orien-
Figure 2 There may be large variations in the dip tation, this is obtained.
estimates, and we hence let the local dip estimate
be the dominating dip found by principal comp o-
nent analysis.

The dominating orientation is found by aggregating the

gradients into a covariance matrix, which is then decom-
posed into its corresponding eigenvectors and eigenval-
ues. The eigenvectors correspond to the three principal
directions of the gradients involved in the covariance ma-
trix with the eigenvalues indicating their magnitude. The
dominating orientation is the eigenvector with the high-
est eigenvalue, and this vector is chosen as our local ori-
entation estimate.

Chaos attribute

The first fault attribute (refer to [2]), follow directly from

the dominating orientation analysis. Figure 3 illustrates
three situations which are distinguishable by studying
the value of the sorted eigenvalues, {λmax , λmid , λmin }.
In cases where the local orientation estimate involves
only gradients from a smooth, unbroken reflector layer as
illustrated in Figure 3(a), λmax will be much larger than
λmid and λmin . If the orientation estimate is taken across
a fault, we will have situations as illustrated in Figure 3
(b) and (c) where we have large λmid and/or λmin . Cal-
culating the ratio between λmid , λmin , and λmax , allows (a) (b)

us to detect such discontinuities.

Figure 4 (a) Seismic cube. (b) Chaos cube gener-

ated from (a).
Edge enhancement attribute

A fault appears as changes in amplitude in the reflectors.

We should thus be able to enhance faults by measuring
changes in the signal amplitude which is exactly what the
edge enhancement attribute does. As previously
discussed, the intersections between different layers
comprise sharp edges and will produce large outputs by
using conventional edge detection techniques. The edge
enhancement attribute reduce this problem by using the
local dip estimates of the reflection layers. The local dip
estimate represents a plane, and by projecting the vector
with the derivatives,
 dx (n1, n2 , n3)  Figure 6 Edge enhanced cube generated from the
  seismic cube shown in Figure 4 (a).
 dn1 
∇ x = 
dx (n1, n2 , n3) 
dn2 , Variance attribute
 
 dx (n1, n2 , n3)  The last attribute we present is the variance attribute.
 dn3 
This attribute uses the local variance as a measure of
onto this plane, changes which are nearly perpendicular signal unconformity. For each voxel, the local variance is
to the reflector will produce vectors with small computed from horizontal sub-slices. If this slice is within
magnitudes, whereas changes in the direction of the an unbroken reflection layer, the amplitude variance will
reflector will produce vectors with larger magnitudes. be small whereas amplitude changes due to a fault will
result in a larger variance. Next, the variance estiamte is
smoothed by a vertical window and amplitude
normalized. The variance attribute may furthermore be
done dip insensitive by performing the variance
estimation in dip corrected slices (“flow surfaces”).For
(a) (b) more details on the variance attribute, refer to [1].

Figure 5 Illustration of the concept of dip guided

edge enhancement. (a) Derivatives indicating
change along the reflector produces a projection
with large magnitude in the dip plane, whereas (b)
derivatives indicating change orthogonal to the
reflector projects as a vector with small magnitude
in the dip plane.

Taking the magnitude of the projected vector as the

attribute value makes this attribute dependent on the
amplitude in the seismic data. Faults in areas of low
amplitude will thus have a weak signature which may be
hard to detect for a human interpreter. The visual
appearance can be corrected for by applying some
amplitude correction, but with the appropriate
subsequent steps this may prove unnecessary in an
automated fault extraction setting. The objective is that
the values along the fault surfaces are local maximum
values, regardless of magnitude. This attribute does not
introduce artifacts by smoothing and picks up very small
amplitude changes (dimming effects of sub-seismic
resolution faults). Hence, even very subtle faults, which
are very hard to visually detect from the seismic data, are
captured. This property often makes it the preferred
attribute for fault extraction. Figure 6 shows an example
of an edge enhanced cube.
Figure 7 Variance cube generated from the seismic
cube shown in Figure 4 (a).
ATTRIBUTE CONDITIONING
The fault surfaces are captured as extrema surfaces
within the attribute cubes. The final step towards
automatic interpretation is to extract these surfaces as
separate objects which can then be exported as
interpretation data to the database. Some features in the
attribute data make this a difficult task:
1. The faults appear more like trends than well-
defined, continous surfaces.
 2. Remains of the strata (e.g. chaotic strata) in the
attribute data also comprise high attribute
values.
3. Intersecting faults are to be extracted as
separate entities.
4. The data contain a high level of noise.
We have developed a method which conditions the
attributes so that these features are no longer a problem.
The method is able to transform the faults into
continuous surfaces and remove noise. It is also able to
separate surfaces on their orientation. Hence, it is able to
filter out horizontal surfaces (remains of horizons) and
also separate the faults into different fault systems. The
method is robust and produces very convincing results
(Figure 8).
Figure 8 Result of conditioning the edge en-
hancement cube (Figure 6). The conditioned cube
is split up into separate fault systems, here illus-
trated by the two dip systems for faults propa-
gating in the inline direction.
The surfaces resulting from the fault enhancement
method are not always sharp. Further conditioning of the
result is performed by thinning. The thinning operation
will for each voxel check whether the current voxel is the
peak value of a neighborhood of n voxels forming a line
perpendicular or nearly perpendicular to the fault. If so, it
is retained, otherwise it will be discarded. As a result, the
surfaces will be thinned. In order to identify the
neighborhood in which to look for a peak value, an
estimate the normal to the fault in the voxel of interest is
needed. One way to make this estimate is to use the
orientation of the gradient vector after projection onto
the orientation plane, as described in connection with the
edge enhancement attribute. This vector will generally be
orthogonal to the fault. The estimates should be
smoothed in order to increase reliability.
SURFACE EXTRACTION
Having performed attribute enhancement, the fault sur-
faces are sharp and continuous, and can be extracted as
connected components. We wish to be able to distin-
guish between the faults. By separating the fault systems
on dip and azimuth in the conditioning step, this is ac-
complished. Figure 8 shows an example where the we
have separated the two fault systems in the inline direc-
tion. Similarly, we separate fault systems in the crossline
direction.
The surfaces are then easily extracted as connected com-
ponents from these cubes and written directly to the da-
tabase as interpretation data. Figure 9 shows extracted
surfaces visualized in an interpretation tool.
Figure 9 The extracted fault surfaces visualized in
a sub volume of the seismic cube.
SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS
In this paper, we have presented the steps in a method
for performing fully automatic fault interpretation. We
use fault enhancing attributes to detect faults. The at-
tributes have different properties and which attribute to
choose is usually data dependent. If a very detailed in-
terpretation is desired, the edge enhanced attribute is
usually the preferred attribute. The attributes produce
high energy outputs along the fault surfaces, but rela-
tively little connectivity within the surfaces. Intersecting
faults and noise make surface extraction from this data
difficult. This is handled by conditioning the attribute
cubes upon extracting the surfaces. The conditioning al-
lows separation of the fault surfaces based on dip and
azimuth, such that cubes with non-intersecting faults can
be created. From these, the surfaces are extracted as con-
nected components.
 REFERENCES
[0] T. Randen, PCT Patent Application No
PCT/IB99/01040 AUTOMATED STRATIGRAPHIC
AND FAULT INTERPRETATION 14.0110/0151
[1] P. Van Bemmel, R. Pepper, “Seismic signal process-
ing method and apparatus for generating a cube of
variance values”, Patent US06151555
[2] T. Randen, E. Monsen, et al. , “Three-Dimensional
Texture Attributes for Seismic Data Analysis”, Ann.
Int. Mtg., Soc. Expl. Geophys., Exp. Abstr, 2000.