Empirical mode decomposition based instantaneous frequency and seismic thin-bed analysis

Empirical mode decomposition (EMD) is designed to decompose non-stationary, nonlinear data into a series of intrinsic mode functions (IMFk, k = 1,2., where k denotes the order of IMF) adaptively; and application of Hubert transform to these IMFk can yield meaningful multi-component instantaneous frequency. This paper firstly applies EMD to the seismic reflection data and calculates the instantaneous frequency of IMFk. And then we employ instantaneous frequency of IMFk to analysis seismic thin bed and obtain the new insights. The results of synthetic examples show that the variation of instantaneous frequency of IMFk is more consistent with the thickness variation of thin bed, compared with that of the instantaneous frequency of original data. The channel analysis of real seismic data demonstrates that instantaneous frequency of IMFk has a significant response to the thickness variation within the channel. These studies illustrate that instantaneous frequency of IMFk can be used in qualifying seismic thin-bed thickness.