A coherence algorithm for 3-D seismic data based on rank correlation

Coherence measurement is an effective method for representing geological discontinuities such as faults and stratigraphic features in 3-D seismic data volumes. Essentially, the coherency methods use the linear correlation to measure discontinuity, which would not be able to capture the information about dependence between two random variables adequately. This paper proposed a coherence algorithm of discontinuities measure for 3-D seismic data based on nonlinear correlation as rank correlation (Kendall's tau). This method has a higher resolution to detect minor discontinuities in seismic data robustly. We demonstrated the advantage of this method by real seismic data examples.