Structure-adaptive anisotropic filter for seismic detail preserving smoothing

Summary: In this paper, we present a structure-adaptive anisotropic Gaussian filter to denoise and enhance 3D reflection seismic data without blurring relevant details such as structural and stratigraphic discontinuities. This filtering framework relies on the computation of the Gradient Structure Tensors (GST) providing information on the local orientation of the geological structures. The filter kernel is anisotropically constructed based on two confidence measures, both of which take into account the regularity of the local seismic structures. So that, the filter shape is well adjusted in accordance with different local geological features. Then the filtering process is steered according to the directional information provided by the GST. We demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed filter through both a comparative experiment with the well-known "Structure-Oriented Filter-Edge Preserving" (SOF-EP) on synthetic blocks and an application to real 3D seismic data.