Seismic Local Instantaneous Frequency Extraction for Describing Superposed Sands

Seismic instantaneous frequency (IF), as one of the instantaneous attributes, is widely used for seismic interpretation and stratigraphy analysis. The Hilbert transform (HT)-based complex analysis approaches are commonly used to extract seismic IF, which are sensitive to kinds of noise contained in field data. Although the normalized HT (NHT) improves the antinoise property of HT by normalizing the original trace, the HT-based methods are a global operator that is not suitable for the local analysis. For example, IF calculated by using the HT-based method is unstable when meeting strong seismic events. In this letter, we propose a workflow to extract local IF (LIF) and then apply it to describe superposed sands. Note that the proposed workflow extracts a stable IF result even when processing a seismic trace with strong events. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed workflow, we apply it to both synthetic and field data. Compared with results from HT and NHT, the proposed workflow provides a stable IF extraction and offers potentials in precisely highlighting superposed sands.