Robust estimates of seismic reflector orientations with weighted vector directional filter

A major difficulty in estimating seismic reflector orientations (dip and azimuth) arises at discrete lateral and vertical discontinuities across which reflector dip and azimuth change. To overcome this problem, we explore a weighted vector directional filter (WVDF) for smoothing volumetric dip and azimuth computed by a finite difference method. The approach falls into three steps: (1) set a reference direction, (2) invert opposite vectors to convert directions into orientations, and (3) smooth the vector field with the WVDF. The smearing and confusing variations that arise across lateral and vertical geological boundaries with traditional dip and azimuth estimations are avoided by the proposed method. This method is more robust for estimating seismic dip and azimuth and has potential for applications such as structure oriented filtering and coherence. A still more promising application of this method is high resolution dip and azimuth analysis through volumetric estimations of reflector curvature. Both synthetic and real data examples are used to demonstrate the ability and efficiency of our approach.