Automatic Seismic Image Analysis

Tool
Niklas Borwell
Bo Lee
Klas Eurenius
Project in Computational Science: Report

Januari 2012
PROJECT REPORT

 r informationsteknologi
Institutionen fo
 Abstract
We have created a tool in C# that looks for geological structures in 2D
seismic images, with the main motivation in its large potential for time
and cost savings in the process of finding oil. Today, still, image screening
is done manually at the same time as the amounts of aquired geological
data grows faster than ever.
Using computer assisted image analysis to screen seismic images is a
largely unexplored field of research, so we apply well known image process-
ing and analysis theory. For image preprocessing this includes intensity
level thresholding, frequency filtering, mathematical morphology etc. For
analysis and classification we use skeletonization, distance transformation,
property measuring etc.
Considering this works as an early stage prototype, the results are
very promising. The produced software tool successes to find and classify
objects correctly, except for some problems which occur when different
image objects are tightly connected. Processing time for processing a
”standard sized” single image ranges from 0.2 s to 10 s depending on how
much information it contains, noting that this is for an AMD Athlon X2
@ 2 GHz and that the code is not optimized.

1
 Acknowledgements
We wish to thank supervisor Sergio Courtade from Schlumberger Ltd. for
providing guidance and expertise in geology and, specifically, in seismic
image interpretation. We also thank course coordinator Maya Neytcheva
for making this project possible at all.

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Contents
1 Introduction 4
1.1 Project description . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
1.2 Confusing terminology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

2 Background 5
2.1 Seismic data format . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
2.2 Computer aided search . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
2.3 Image interpretation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

3 Methodology 7

4 Theory 7
4.1 Objects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
4.2 Threshold . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
4.3 Closing operation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
4.4 Bounding box . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
4.5 Skeleton representation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
4.6 Constrained distance transform . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
4.7 Elongatedness measure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10

5 Implementation 11
5.1 Mark interesting areas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
5.2 Merge areas into objects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
5.3 Classifying objects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
5.4 Vector representation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
5.4.1 Skeletonization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
5.4.2 Path selection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
5.4.3 Path sampling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
5.5 Separation problem . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18

6 Results 19
6.1 Main images . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
6.2 Other images . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
6.3 Speed . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20

7 Further development 22
7.1 3D . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
7.2 Use more data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
7.3 Complementing segmentation methods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
7.4 Employ an advanced classification tool . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
7.5 Parallelization and optimization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25

8 Conclusion 25

9 References 25

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1 Introduction
As it becomes increasingly difficult to find profitable deposits of oil to explore,
the accuracy of the information regarding promising geological sites becomes
more and more important. Huge amounts of seismic data are collected every
week but the manpower and time needed to analyze all the data manually
imposes a huge cost. This means that the need for a computerized automated
analysis tool is in great demand.

1.1 Project description

The aim of this project is to create a prototype program that can automatically
find and classify interesting objects in seismic images. The prototype program
should work as a first step towards a fully functional automated analysis tool.
Our prototype program is developed to work on a special type of images,
namely colour coded amplitude spectrum images. It can easily be modified by
changing a few parameters to handle different images. Automatic parameter
adjustment is very complex, however, and lies outside our project scope.
We were given nine time slice images as our development dataset. They are all
from the same place, only separated by some milliseconds in depth(see Section
2.1).
In the amplitude spectrum images the reflections from softer sediments are
clearly differentiable from the reflections of solid rock, making interesting ar-
eas easily detectable for human eyes. However, present in all these images are
virtual artefacts (see Section 2.3) that make the task of classification and dif-
ferentiation much harder.

(a) Original image (b) Interestin geological features detected

and marked

Figure 1: Example of seismic image before and after processing

1.2 Confusing terminology

In this report the words channel and object are used extensively. Both words
carry two meanings.

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 Object refers to an image object, meaning a feature in the image that has
been segmented (see Section 4.1). Geological objects are the actual physical
objects represented in the unprocessed images such as channels, deposits and
similar features that are interested to locate.
Channel will mainly refer to long elongated geological objects, like old riverbeds
or valleys. Sometimes channel will refer to an information channel from the
measuring equipment that was used for a particular picture. For example, the
data we have used is the acoustic amplitude reflection channel in the seismolog-
ical measuring equipment, or it might refer to the red color channel in a RGB
image. In these cases we clarify what kind of channel we refer to, and if we
don’t have a better name for it then it will be called “information channel”.

2 Background
2.1 Seismic data format
The subsurface is mapped to digital 3D volumes by sound waves - if onshore
by special vibrator trucks attached with an array of receiving geophones, if
offshore by boats with an air gun generating vibrations. The transmitted waves
are reflected back when hitting density boundaries of, e.g., changes in rock types
or fluid contents. Using this method the signal’s time of travel is closely related
to subsurface depth (Satterfield/Whiteley).
Upon interpreting, the recorded volume is often sliced vertically, horizontally
or along a ”horizon”. The latter represents a line or surface corresponding to
a density border. Though, for this project we will solely work with horizontal
slices which are more commonly known as ”time slices”. The data is colored
red and blue where high amplitude reflections occur (Figure 2).

2.2 Computer aided search

Due to modern techniques and depleting oil supplies the oil industry encounters
a very rapid growth in the amount of seismic data to analyze. But the increse
in the number of employed doesn’t by far reflect this increase in collected data.
As for now, the images are screened manually. In order to streamline the
process it does seem natural to consider computer based image analysis.

2.3 Image interpretation

As mentioned in Section 2.1, red and blue parts of an image are strong reflec-
tions. In general, the more reflections an image shows, the more interesting it
is. The reflections build up shapes that represent different geological objects,
and we learned that our image set has three different kinds of objects (Figure
3):

• channels,

• deposits,

• structural reflections.

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 (a) 3D volume illustration with stacked time slices. The
time resolution of the original data set is 2 ms.

(b) Time slice where a channel can be seen. (c) Vertical slice of the 3D volume. Horizons
We work with this kind of images. are the red and blue lines running through
the image horizontally.

Figure 2: 3D volume and 2D slices.

Of these, the last one requires additional explanation. Structural reflections

somtimes occur when slicing the dataset horizontally where there is a density
region border that is at an angle compared to the horizontal plane of the 3D
volume, for example a bedrock slope. This means that structural reflections
are only artificial and not real geological objects and are only present in the
2D slices. They are very difficult to tell apart from other objects by looking at
their shape. The outlining done in Figure 3(b) is made by an expert. An ideal
seismic image analysis tool can manage to ignore structural reflections.

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 (a) Image with three different object types (b) Objects outlined. Red: deposit, green:
from our dataset. structural reflection, blue: channcel.

Figure 3: Object types.

3 Methodology
This project is not based on or built on any previous work in this area, so we
build our tool using well-known image analysis algorithms programmed in high
level languages. In general the following is our method of development:
1. Use MATLAB and its Image Processing Toolbox to try different image
analysis methods. The Image Processing Toolbox offers a comprehensive
set of image analysis functions, and allows for a very quick startup phase
in the development process.
2. When we feel confident that we have found a working method, the MAT-
LAB code is migrated to C# code. For image processing and analysis we
use EmguCV which is a .NET wrapper to the Intel OpenCV image process-
ing library (for C/C++). While searching for suitable image processing
libraries we found that OpenCV is, arguably, a de facto standard in im-
age processing and computer vision implementations. EmguCV/OpenCV
does actually not do everything MATLAB does, which forces us to imple-
ment many algorithms ourselves.
The choice of using C# (instead of e.g. C) is solely because Schlumberger’s
software platform Petrel nicely allows for .NET plugins or apps. While our
tool is not a Petrel application, it had been considered in an early stage.
Furthermore, making it C# will facilitate any attempts to integrate it
within Petrel in the future.
3. Final evaluation of results and computation times. Even though speed is
not a part of our goals, the problem formulation has an inherent speed
concern - the tool needs to outperform human screening.

4 Theory
This section aims to explain certain image analysis concepts and methods used
in the implementation.

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4.1 Objects
We often describe a binary image (i.e. an image with only two colors: black
and white) in terms of objects and background. An object in this context is
defined as a connected white area, while all black pixels are considered part of
the background. An example of this concept is shown in Figure 4.

Figure 4: A binary image with 3 objects.

4.2 Threshold
Threshold is the most common way to select parts of an image. In a normal
8-bit grayscale image, each pixel has a brightness value that ranges between 0
and 255. When we use a threshold, we simply select those pixels that have a
brightness value larger than a certain threshold. Then we create a new binary
image where the selected pixels are set to white and the rest set to black. An
example of this technique with different threshold values is shown in Figure 5.
By using color space transformations this can be extended to a more general
concept. By converting the image to a HLS (Hue-Lightness-Saturation) color
space, the saturation and hue will also be represented by a grayscale image.
So by applying threshold to for instance the saturation channel, we can select
saturated areas.

4.3 Closing operation

A closing operation is defined by two consecutive operations; a dilation followed
by an erosion. The purpose of this operation is to connect neighbouring white
areas in binary images while keeping as much of the original shape as possible.
The dilation step is used to extend the borders of white areas to connect
neighbouring areas. The erosion step peels off the outer border of the white
areas in the same way they were dilated to restore the original shape, while
keeping the new connections between areas. The process is demonstrated in
Figure 6.

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 (a) Original image (b) Result of a threshold at 167

(c) Result of a threshold at 200

Figure 5: Example of threshold technique

4.4 Bounding box

The bounding box of an object is the smallest rectangular box that can be
drawn (with a vertical-horizontal alignment) that encapsulates every pixel of
the object. An example of this is shown in Figure 7

4.5 Skeleton representation

A skeleton representation is a way of representing objects with thin lines, where
the lines should represent the inner structure of the object. The method to
achieve this used in the implementation works by iteravely finding and removing
pixels which are found to be non-skeleton points, i.e. a pixel which is not
important for the inner structure. An example of a skeleton representation is
shown in Figure 8.

4.6 Constrained distance transform

The distance transform is an operation which outputs an image where each
object pixel value is equal to the distance between the pixel and the closest
background pixel in the original image. When using constrained distance trans-
form, the distance is only allowed to be calculated over certain areas.
A special case of this is used in the implementation, where we only allow
distance to be calculated on a line from an endpoint of the line. The result of
this is a numbered line where each value represents the number of pixels between
the pixel and the starting point. An example of this is shown in Figure 9.

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 (a) Input image with three disconnected white areas

(b) Image after dilation. The white areas have been con-
nected

(c) Image after erosion. Notice that the white areas are
connected while the major shape of the original areas are
preserved

Figure 6: Steps for the closing operation

4.7 Elongatedness measure

The elongatedness measure is a way of differentiating between elongated shapes
and more compact, circular shapes. It is defined by Sonka, Hlaval och Boyle
(2008, 355) as

area
elongatedness = ,
(2d)2

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 (a) Original image (b) Image with bounding box in
red

Figure 7: Example of a bounding box

(a) Original image (b) Skeleton representation

Figure 8: Example of a skeleton representation

where d is the number of erosions that can be applied to an object before it

disappears (see Section 4.3). It is a measure of the maximum thickness of a
shape and the elongatedness measure therefore gives a measure of the ratio of
the area to the squared maximum thickness of a shape. It is very useful since
it works for any general shape.

5 Implementation
The input image used to demonstrate the steps of the program is shown in
Figure 10. The main algorithm consists of the following steps.

1. Mark interesting areas.

2. Merge areas into objects.
3. Remove uninteresting objects.
4. Classifiy objects.

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 (a) Input image with a branching line (b) Result of constrained distance trans-
and blue pixel as a starting point form

Figure 9: Example of constrained distance transform

5. Vector representation.

The algorithm uses four user defined search parameters, which makes it possible
to adapt the algorithm for different kinds of images:

• A search criterion which defines what to look for

• A sensitivity value for the search criterion

• A merging parameter which defines how dense the interesting areas are.

• A size limit that defines how small objects we are interested in.

The main steps of the algorithm are described below.

5.1 Mark interesting areas

In the first step interesting areas are marked based on a search parameter. This
parameter consists of two parts; one or more search criterion combined with a
sensitivity value for each. The search criterion in the given example is areas
of blue, red and yellow color. This is achieved by converting the image to an
appropriate color space and selecting areas in different information channels.
This method gives the algorithm a lot of possibilities due to the wide range of
color space transformations available. Examples of possible search options could
be areas with a certain color, saturated or unsaturated areas, dark or bright
areas or any combination of the above. The sensitivity parameter for each
channel is implemented through a simple binary threshold value (see Section
4.2).
The output of this step is a black and white image where white areas are
considered interesting (see Figure 11).

5.2 Merge areas into objects

In this step interesting areas are combined into objects, where object in this case
means a connected white area (see Section 4.1). The goal is for these objects
to represent real life objects so that no separate objects are connected to each
other and no single object is divided into two separate objects. This is however
in some cases impossible, since different objects often overlap and share the

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Figure 10: Original image. We want to find and mark the channel and the
deposit.

same properties (see Section 4.3). The result is therefore often a compromise
between the two. Possible solutions to this problem are discussed in Section 7.
The technique used to merge areas is a closing operation (see Section 4.3).
The size of the closing operation is controlled by a search parameter which
defines the minimum distance between two areas to be considered part of the
same object. The output of this step is a binary image consisting of objects and
background (see Section 4.1), see Figure 12.

5.3 Classifying objects

In this step we perform some measurements on each object which are used to
remove uninsteresting objects and classify the remaining. Currently we have
two measurements; area and elongatedness (see Section 4.7).
The area measurement is used for removing objects considered too small and
is controlled by a search parameter which defines a minimum area for interesting
objects. One can also consider using more measurements to define interesting
objects such as length, positon or base it on the classification.
The classification is based on the elongatedness measurement which differ-
entiates channels from more round objects such as deposits. The classification
uses a threshold value; objects with an elongatedness over 10 is considered a
channel and below 10 a non-channel. The value 10 was chosen by comparing
the value for several different shapes and choosing the value that best agreed

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 Figure 11: Output of step 1. Interesting areas are marked in white.

with our own observations. A lot of improvement in this area is possible and
discussed further in Section 7. The output of this step is a list of interesting
objects with measurements and classification result (see Figure 13).

5.4 Vector representation

In this step each object is processed individually based on its classification. Cur-
rently only objects classified as channels will go through individual processing.
For these channels a vector representation is created, which has many potential
benefits. Currently we use this to calculate the length of a channel, but since
we have a mathematical representation of the channel’s path, many more ad-
vanced measurements are possible. We could for instance calculate whether it
is straight or curved and how it bends.
Another important possibility is related to the segmentation problem of di-
viding objects described in Section 5.5. With the vector representation we can
see the direction of a channels path and by using that we could automatically
connect accidentally disconnected channel segments.
The vector representation should have the following properties

• Runs along the entire length of the channel.

• Is centered in the channel in each point.

• Has a variable detail level, controlled by a parameter.

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 Figure 12: Output of step 2. Interesting areas are merged into objects.

It is accopmlished through the following steps

5.4.1 Skeletonization
The first step is to create a skeleton representation of the object (see Section
5.4.1). The resulting image has a centerline running through the object along
with a number of branches (see Figure 14).

5.4.2 Path selection

The goal in this step is to select only the centerline of the skeleton, which is
accomplished by making two asumptions

1. One of the endpoints of the centerline touches the bounding box of the
object (see Section 4.4).
2. The centerline is the the longest possible line in the skeleton that agrees
with 1.

Although an implementation without the need for touching the bounding

box can be accomplished, it would make the algorithm considerably slower and
was therefore not implemented. These asumptions are clearly not accurate for
all types of possible elongated shapes, but are accurate enough when considering
real-life channels. By using these asumptions we can find the centerline from
the skeleton in the following way

15
Figure 13: Output of step 3. Uninteresting objects are removed and remaining
objects are classified.

16
 Figure 14: Skeleton representation of a channel.

1. Find all points connected to the bounding box of the object

2. Calculate a constrained distance transform image for each point found in

1 (see Section 4.6)

3. Select the point with the highest value found in the distance transform
images.

4. Trace the path from the highest value back to zero.

The traced path will be the assumed centerline of the object (see Figure 15).

5.4.3 Path sampling

The final step is to sample the centerline of the object to create a simplified
vector representation. This is done by selecting points from the centerline and
measuring the error between the curves. The error is defined as the relative
difference between the length of the original line and the length of the vector
representation. More points are then added from the centerline until the error
is below a threshold.
To improve the result, two accuracy limits were used; one for normal and
one for short curve segments. This gives a total of three parameters to control
the detail level of the vector representation: accuracy for normal segements,
accuracy for short segments and length threshold for what is considered a short

17
 Figure 15: Asumed centerline.

segment. Although it would be possible to control all these manually, we decided

to simplify the usage by introducing a single parameter which controls the other
three which ranges between 0.8 and 1.
An example of a final vector representation is shown in Figure 16.

5.5 Separation problem

The most difficult problem of the algorithm appears in Section 5.2: Merging of
areas into objects. The different objects we wish to distinguish between usually
share the same appearance and properties which makes a direct classification
impossible. This is further complicated by the fact that they often overlap, see
Figure17. Different objects are sometimes more connected to each other than
objects are in themselves, which makes a perfect separation based on connect-
edness also impossible.
The issue comes from the fact that we are looking at 2D slices from a com-
plete 3D volume which sometimes even makes it hard for a person to distinguish
between different objects. Possible solutions for this problem are discussed in
Section 7.

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 Figure 16: Channel object with corresponding vector representation.

6 Results
In this section we consider the output of two different types of images. The first
we call ”main images” because the program development is almost exclusively
based on this type. The other image type is discussed in ”Other images” (Section
6.2) and we use it to demonstrate some flexibility of the tool. Last, a discussion
about speed is included.

6.1 Main images

To evaluate results of the program we start with one of the nine images from
Schlumberger. Because of the separation problem (Section 5.5) we use two
versions of this image. The first version is the unmodified image (Figure 18(b)).
In the other version we have by hand disconnected connected objects (Figure
18(a)).
We see that in the modified image, objects are classfied correctly. There are
a channel object and a deposit object.
The channel and the deposit are connected to each other in the original
image, where the connection region is equally wide as the channel. This is a
segmentation problem that requires a much more complex solution than we have
implemented. We discuss possible improvements in Section 7.
Even though the deposit and the channel are segmented as one object, the
vectorization step finds the right channel path. This can be considered as a

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Figure 17: Illustration of separation problem. The channel (orange arrow) is
strongly connected to the deposit (blue arrow) which is further connected to the
structural reflections (green arrows).

coincidental case because the correct channel path just happens to be slightly
longer than the second longest endpoint-to-endpoint path. Unfortunately this
can not be guaranteed to hold in the general case.

6.2 Other images

Here we try another image (Figure 19) with a visible channel. The common
feature between this image and the main image type is that objects of interest
have distinctly different color intensity compared to background objects. On the
other hand notable differences are color space, contrast and size. By changing
the parameters of the algorithm, this image can also be nicely segmented and
classified for objects.

6.3 Speed
In the long run, beyond our prototype program, speed is of utmost importance.
Due to time constraints we haven’t optimized our code with respect to speed,
but we will here present some figures to show that doing automatic segmentation
and classification can become a huge benefit in future.
The computations are done on an Athlon X2 2.0 Ghz (2005) CPU, and the
code is not in any way optimized for this CPU type. A single original size
(557x475 pixels) image takes up to 10 s to process if there are objects present.

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 (a) Modified image where the different ob- (b) Unmodified image where all objects are
ject types have been separated. connected.

(c) Object 1 Class: channel, Elongated- (d) Channel and deposit are segmented as
ness: 18.4, Size: 43 · 103 , Length: 813. Ob- one image object. Note that the vector rep-
ject 2 Class: deposit, Elongatedness: 5.2, resentation is the same as in (a) because of
Size: 14 · 103 , Length: 813. longest path beteween endpoints.

Figure 18: Result images showing segmentation, vector representation, classifi-

cation and measurements.

On the other hand an ”empty” image takes only a fraction of a second to process
(see Figure 20).
We note that the images we are working with are high resolution compared
to the amount of information (useful for us) they contain. As the computation
time is linear to the image’s pixel count (see Table 1), we can make use of
downscaling in order to gain speed. As an example, our main image (Figure
18) segments the same even when downscaled to 25% of its original size. This
would have to be a rather dynamic algorithm because the width of channels
vary greatly.
Finally we state that these speed results show an obvious advantage of using
machines instead of humans for image screening. Also there are many options to
optimize the performance of our implementation even further, e.g. optimizing
for CPU, optimizing the image processing algorithms, and even changing to a
more modern computer.

21
 (a) Input image. Alternative image type from Schlum-
berger.

(b) Output image. Class: channel, Elongatedness: 28.4,

Size: 35 · 103 , Length: 1040

Figure 19: Results for the alternative image type.

(a) 4.5 s to process this image with objects (b) 0.3 s to process image with nothing to
present. classify.

Figure 20: Computation times for images with and without objects.

7 Further development

This chapter discusses some ideas we have for further development, some of the
issues we have not been able to solve yet and some ideas we have for solving
them.

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 Resolution (pixels) Relative size (%) Time (s)
278x237 25 ≈1
417x356 50 ≈2
557x475 100 ≈4−5
1114x950 200 ≈ 15 − 18

Table 1: Computation time is linear to pixel count.

7.1 3D
Our program is developed to work on 2D data slices from a large 3D data set,
handling one image at a time segmenting and classifying the objects we think
are interesting and marking them before moving on to the next one.
This process is repeated for every slice in the dataset until the whole volume is
analysed.
The same methods that are used to analyse the 2D slices could be generalised
to work on the 3D volume. The reason for doing the analysis in 2D in the first
place is inherited from manual analysis. It is difficult for humans to see through
a 3D volume so the volume is sliced to allow it to be properly examined. This
limitation does not apply to computers.
We think that analysing the data set in 3D is preferable to 2D for several
reasons. The main reason is that having the whole 3D object gives us much more
information and would render otherwise quite difficult operations unnecessary.
When handling 2D slices we have to take into account that the seismological
objects we are looking for are not flat but stretched over several time-slices, mak-
ing it necessary to track the objects through the dataset in order to determine
how many different objects that are actually present in the volume.
Using 3D, this would become unnecessary as each object would be segmented
as a whole from the start. Having access to full 3D objects could also be
helpful when trying to differentiate between different geological objects that
are connected to each other as image objects for some reason.
We discussed in Section 6.1 the problem of having two different kinds of ob-
jects closely connected, with no image information that clearly separates them,
(Figure 17). This connection however is not present in all of the images in our
dataset meaning that a human analyst can with relative certainty say that those
are two separate objects. If we examine the 3D mock up (Figure 21), created
by interpolating our nine time slice dataset to give it a bit more volume, we can
quite easily see that the deposit, even though it is connected to the channel is
probably not a part of the channel. More importantly, it will be easier for the
computer to make this discovery. This kind of interpolation would of course be
unnecessary if the whole 3D volume is used.
Structural reflections are a major problem when processing and analysing 2D
slices (see Section 2.3), handling the data volume in 3D will ease this problem.

7.2 Use more data

One major difficulty we have faced during the development of this program
is lack of data. Due to restrictive security classification of the data volumes
we where only allowed to work with 9 time slices of somewhat preprocessed

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Figure 21: 3D mock up of the channel and the deposit. In this image it is
possible to see that the deposit (blue area on the right) is probably not a part
of the channel.

images (the acoustic amplitude reflection information-channel was chosen from

the dataset).
If the program could use all attributes and information channels from the
dataset we think that both segmentation and classification could be made much
more accurate. Comparisons between as well as combination of different infor-
mation channels will be possible. This information can then be used to discover
and remove noise and to help separate the kind of objects that we are not able
to separate in this version of the program.

7.3 Complementing segmentation methods

In this version of the program, we employ thresholding in the acoustic amplitude
information channel as the main segmentation method, but thresholding is not
the only segmentation method available that we have considered. It is by far
the most effective method for the images in our dataset though, which is why
it was chosen. There might however be characteristics in other information
channels and images where it is desirable to employ other segmentation method
to complement thresholding. There are two additional methods for segmentation
that are often used, edge detection and texture analysis (Gonzales, Woods 2008,
447-450, 675-679). Both of these methods should be considered again when
implementing further developments.

7.4 Employ an advanced classification tool

Our prototype program uses a very simple classifier. First all objects that are
too small to be of interest are removed. The remaining objects are then classi-
fied based on how elongated they are. If the object is long enough it is classified
as a channel. This simple classifier is the result of our very limited dataset.
Implementing an advanced classifier based solely on nine images was never con-
sidered. We have also held back on the amount of geometric measurements
we do in the segmented image as we don’t really know what measurements are
actually useful and it will be very easy to implement them later.

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 Principal component analysis (PCA) can be used in conjunction with as
suitable classifier to create a powerful classification tool. PCA transforms the
parameter space into an eigenvector space based om maximum variance along
each eigenvector. This transformation reduces the number of dimensions to
consider when classifying a dataset, making it easier and faster to do so (Jolliffe
2002, 1-6).
We mentioned “suitable” classifier above instead of naming one. This is
because different methods are suitable for different types of data. Before a clas-
sifier is chosen we need to know very well how the measured data is distributed.
A supervised classifier is probably the best choice though as it can be tailored
to the data. This means that the classifier needs to be taught how to behave,
and for that end a large quantity of data is needed.

7.5 Parallelization and optimization

At the moment it takes about 0.2 - 10 seconds to process an image on our
test machine (see Section 6.3). This is a long time if you intend to process
thousands of pictures, so like in all applications parallelization is necessary. If
the program is to continue processing 2D time slices, parallelization could be
as simple as to divide the images between the threads as each image can be
processed individually.
The code we have written is not optimized for speed meaning that there is
much room for improvement that can reduce the processing time considerably.

8 Conclusion
We have met the goals we set at the beginning of this project. We have created a
prototype program that can segment, detect and, to some degree, classify inter-
esting objects in seismic images. The program is tuned to work on color coded
acoustic amplitude reflection images but can be adapted to different images by
changing a few parameters.
Two major concerns are still present that we have not been able to solve
in the scope of this project. These are separation of geological objects that
should not be connected and an advanced classification tool. The program is
by no means a complete analysis tool and there is a lot of room for further
development. We have given a few suggestions to this end in this report.

9 References
Dorothy Satterfield, Martin Whiteley. Seismic Interpretation and Subsurface
Mapping. http://www.derby.ac.uk/files/seismic interpretation.ppt (January 12,
2012)

Gonzales, Rafael C, Woods, Richard E. 2008. Digital image processing. 3rd

Efition. New Jersey: Pearson Education Inc.

Jolliffe, I.T. 2002 Principal component analysis. 2nd Edition. New York:
Springer-verlag New York Inc.

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Sonka, Milan, Hlavac, Vaclav och Boyle, Roger. 2008. Image processing, Anal-
ysis, and Machine Vision. 3rd Edition. Stamford: CENGAGE Learning

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