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Seismic data interpretation using the Hough transform and principal component analysis

This article has been downloaded from IOPscience. Please scroll down to see the full text article. 2011 J. Geophys. Eng. 8 61 (http://iopscience.iop.org/1742-2140/8/1/008) View the table of contents for this issue, or go to the journal homepage for more

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IOP PUBLISHING J. Geophys. Eng. 8 (2011) 6173

JOURNAL OF GEOPHYSICS AND ENGINEERING

doi:10.1088/1742-2132/8/1/008

Seismic data interpretation using the Hough transform and principal component analysis
M G Orozco-del-Castillo1 , C Ortiz-Alem n1 , R Martin2 , a R Avila-Carrera1 and A Rodrguez-Castellanos1
1 2

Instituto Mexicano del Petr leo, Eje Central L zaro C rdenas 152, M xico, DF 07730, M xico o a a e e Universit de Pau et des Pays de lAdour, CNRS & INRIA Magique-3D, Laboratoire de Mod lisation e e et dImagerie en G osciences UMR 5212, Avenue de lUniversit , 64013 Pau Cedex, France e e E-mail: rcarrer@imp.mx, jcortiz@imp.mx, mgabriel@imp.mx, arcastel@imp.mx and roland.martin@univ-pau.fr

Received 19 February 2010 Accepted for publication 9 November 2010 Published 9 December 2010 Online at stacks.iop.org/JGE/8/61 Abstract In this work two novel image processing techniques are applied to detect and delineate complex salt bodies from seismic exploration proles: Hough transform and principal component analysis (PCA). It is well recognized by the geophysical community that the lack of resolution and poor structural identication in seismic data recorded at sub-salt plays represent severe technical and economical problems. Under such circumstances, seismic interpretation based only on the human-eye is inaccurate. Additionally, petroleum eld development decisions and production planning depend on good-quality seismic images that generally are not feasible in salt tectonics areas. In spite of this, morphological erosion, region growing and, especially, a generalization of the Hough transform (closely related to the Radon transform) are applied to build parabolic shapes that are useful in the idealization and recognition of salt domes from 2D seismic proles. In a similar way, PCA is also used to identify shapes associated with complex salt bodies in seismic proles extracted from 3D seismic data. To show the validity of the new set of seismic results, comparisons between both image processing techniques are exhibited. It is remarkable that the main contribution of this work is oriented in providing the seismic interpreters with new semi-automatic computational tools. The novel image processing approaches presented here may be helpful in the identication of diapirs and other complex geological features from seismic images. Conceivably, in the near future, a new branch of seismic attributes could be recognized by geoscientists and engineers based on the encouraging results reported here.
Keywords: diapirs, Hough transform, image processing, feature extraction, salt bodies, seismic

exploration, proles, pattern recognition

1. Introduction
The analysis of seismic data is important for understanding the subsurface of the earth, but the process is usually not a simple task. Because of the growing volume and resolution of seismic data, digital image processing (DIP) is becoming an important component of this process, aiming to detect geological features
1742-2132/11/010061+13$33.00

in seismic volumes (3D) without the full assistance of an interpreter. Several advances in DIP have been made in the computer science research area and in its application to other areas, particularly medical images (Udupa 1999) and detection, recognition and tracking of human features (e.g. faces, heads, arms) (Turk and Pentland 1991). These advances have not been fully applied to geophysical science, 61

2011 Nanjing Geophysical Research Institute Printed in the UK

M G Orozco-del-Castillo et al

and we believe that automated and semi-automated seismic interpretations are feasible and very useful. Traditionally seismic analysis has been done by humaneyed empirical interpretation of just some of the processed 2D slices of the whole 3D seismic volume. This usually implies loss of information. Due to the increasing volume and resolution of seismic data, along with the increasing computational power, direct processing and semi-automatic interpretation of 3D seismic data are becoming more practical (Jeong et al 2006). Seismic interpretation can be broadly subdivided into two components (Cohen and Coifman 2002): structural, which investigates the nature and geometry of the subsurface structures, and stratigraphic, which investigates the subsurface stratigraphy. A rst step in seismic interpretation usually consists of image segmentation, and it relies heavily on the human visualization of sophisticated and complex images. Seismic interpretation also involves feature discrimination and visualization, both of which are fundamental to exploratory data analysis in many other areas of science. An early and signicant contribution was the coherence cube, proposed by Bahorich and Farmer (1995). Their work has served other research areas related to the coherence concept, like the robust coherence estimation algorithm based on multiple traces with locally adapted similarity (semblance) measures (Marfurt et al 1998). Another variant of the coherence cube based on eigenanalysis of the covariance matrix was proposed by Gersztenkorn and Marfurt (1999). A practical survey of several variants of the coherence cube algorithm can be found in Chopra (2002). Some other approaches include a more efcient discontinuity measure computation method using a normalized trace of a small correlation matrix (Cohen and Coifman 2002). Applications with high-order statistics and supertrace techniques for more accurate coherence estimation are presented by Lu et al (2005). Some efforts have been made to automatically detect and classify geological features, such as seismic facies. Seismic facies are groups of seismic reections whose parameters (such as amplitude, continuity, reection geometry and frequency) differ from those of adjacent groups (West et al 2002). Seismic facies analysis involves two key steps: (a) their classication and (b) their interpretation to produce a geologic and depositional interpretation. West et al (2002) presented an application of textural analysis to 3D seismic volumes, combining image textural analysis with a neural network classication to quantitatively map seismic facies in 3D data. A similar approach based on competitive neural networks for the classication and identication of reservoir facies from seismic data was presented by Saggaf et al (2003). Some other automatic techniques for classication of seismic facies include identication of the boundaries of rapidly varying sand facies using a Bayesian linear decision function (Matlock et al 1985); determination of the sand/shale ratio of various zones in the reservoir using discriminant factor analysis (Mathieu and Rice 1969); identication of seismic facies using both principal component analysis (PCA) and discriminant factor analysis (Dumay and Fournier 1988); segmentation of a seismic section based on its texture through a knowledge-based expert system (Simaan 1991) and detection of anomalous 62

facies in data using a back-propagation neural network (Yang and Huang 1991). Another line of investigation corresponds to fault surfaces. Where it is not required to extract the actual fault surfaces, some methods have been employed to enhance a fault structure (Weickert 1999, Bakker et al 1999, Fehmers and H cker 2003). o Despite the fact that ltering methods have proven useful to the interpreters, there is still a signicant human experience-based interpretation to be done after its application. Hence, there has been a trend to automatically or semi-automatically detect faults from seismic cubes in recent years. For example, Cohen et al (2006) proposed a method for detecting and extracting fault surfaces by creating and processing a volume of estimates from seismic data which represents the likelihood that a given point lays on a fault surface. Jeong et al (2006) developed a volumetric, seismic fault detection system aimed for an interactive nonlinear 3D processing. This system was also combined with a graphics processing unit, showing the benets over a CPU implementation. Oil and gas prospecting has found a major challenge in regions with complex geological settings, like areas with salt tectonics. Broad areas exist in the world where seismic depth imaging is a difcult task due to the progressive lack of resolution beneath the presence of salt bodies. As oil exploration targets may be located close or below salt bodies, in the underlying geologic structure, there is a growing interest in computational tools that can help seismic interpreters to estimate geometry, position and depth distribution of diapirs from seismic proles and volume data. Under favourable circumstances, traditional seismic processing and interpretation can provide an appropriate location of the top of salt bodies. Nevertheless, estimation of the base of salt domes (and geometry distribution of salt at depth in general) is often a difcult task. In the application of standard seismic processing techniques it is common to nd complex wave diffraction patterns giving rise to a signicant lack of illumination near and below salt bodies. A traditional and successful approach to seismic data analysis has been the Radon transform (Moon et al 1986, Foster and Mosher 1992, Trad et al 2003). A very similar approach in the eld of DIP has been the Hough transform (Hough 1962) which, just like the Radon transform, is a mapping from image space to a parameter space. The Hough transform has been applied for error analysis (Aguado et al 2000, Jacquemin and Mallet 2005, Montana 1992, Niblack and Petkovic 1988, Rosenhahn et al 2001, Shapiro 1975, 1978a, 1978b), reduction of the computational complexity (Kiryati and Bruckstein 1992), extensions to other shapes (Aguado et al 1995, Ballard 1981, Van Ginkel 2002), choice of the appropriate parameterization (Duda and Hart 1972, Van Veen and Groen 1981, Westin and Knutsson 1992), tracking and pose estimation (Princen et al 1994), etc. The Hough transform has also been successfully applied to seismology, using a variant of this methodology based on a cascade of two Hough transforms and a specic backward transformation to automatically extract faults from a 3D seismic cube (Jacquemin and Mallet 2005). The detection of geologic patterns on seismic proles can be thought of as a complex problem, i.e. a problem

Seismic data interpretation using Hough transform and PCA

that is best suited for a human than a machine, at least in the traditional use of computing power. Interpreters of seismic data are usually able to detect patterns successfully despite changes in the images due to noise and variations from one body to another and even from one seismic prole to another. A main problem for the interpretation of seismic proles is being able to automate or semi-automate the abilities of an interpreter using a computational method. Much of the work in automated pattern recognition ignores the issue of which aspects of the pattern stimulus are important for identication. For example, one of the most important goals of seismic stratigraphy is to recognize and analyse seismic facies regarding the geologic environment. Two main problems become evident: to determine which seismic parameters are relevant for characterizing the facies and to be sure that there is a link between the seismic parameters and the geologic facies we are investigating (Dumay and Fournier 1988). Seismic pattern recognition and detection of geological structures are also very high level operations for which the classication according to detailed geometry or specic information may be very difcult, inefcient, and either way, probably useless. When trying to detect seismic patterns, the interpreter does not focus his or her attention on the geometric or quantitative characteristics of them, but rather on their global features, which may or may not be directly related to our intuitive notion of features. In other words, the interpreter is able to detect the principal components of the patterns, but he is probably not able to tell which those components are. Interpretation of seismic data is a very high level task. By these means, seismic pattern recognition is very similar to other pattern recognition tasks, like speech or face recognition. Face recognition is also a very high level task, where humans perform considerably better than computers, especially for quantitative and statistical methodologies which attempt to detect individual features, and dene a face model by the position, size and relationships among these features. In this work we study the feasibility of applying two distinct pattern recognition approaches as auxiliary tools for seismic methods to improve detection of salt bodies and determination of their complex geometry: a Hough transform mathematical morphology approach and a PCA approach. These two methodologies, while not entirely automatic, clearly have the potential to reduce the workload of the seismic interpreter by asking him to dene how the salt bodies look, by either establishing some initial parameters or manually selecting some training images, instead of looking for the salt bodies manually throughout the whole seismic cube.

satisfy yi = hxi + k for different values of h and k. However, writing this equation as k = yi hxi and considering the hk plane (also known as the parameter space), the equation for a unique line for a determined pair (xi , yi ) is obtained. Besides, a second point (xj , yj ) also has a line in the parameter space associated with it, and this one intersects the line associated with (xi , yi ) in (h , k ), where h is the slope and k is the yintercept of the line that contains (xi , yi ) and (xj , yj ) in the xy plane. In fact, all of the points contained in this line have lines in the parameter space that pass through (h , k ). The main attraction for the use of the Hough transform comes from the subdivision of the parameter space in what are denominated accumulator cells, where (hmax , hmin ) and (kmax , kmin ) are the expected range values for the slope and the y-intercept, respectively. The cells with coordinates (i, j), with an accumulator value A(i, j), correspond to the square associated with the coordinates in the parameter space (hi , kj ). Initially, these cells are set to zero. Then, for each point (xp , yp ) of the image plane, the parameter h is xed to each and every one of the allowed values of subdivision for the x axis, and k is obtained from solving the corresponding equation k = yk hxk . After this procedure, a value of M in A(i, j) corresponds to M points of the xy plane located in the line y = hi x + kj . The precision of the collinearity of these points is determined by the number of subdivisions of the hk plane. When subdividing the x axis in P increments, for each point (xp , yp ), the P values of k correspond to the P possible values of h. With n image points, this method implies nP operations. Therefore, this procedure is linear in n, and nP operations are easily calculated using a standard computer. The Hough transform was originally dened to detect straight lines in black and white images. As it is trivial to generalize the Hough transform to other shapes and greyvalue images, we describe it in its extended form. We set up an N-dimensional accumulator array; each dimension corresponding to one of the parameters of the shape looked for. Each element of this array contains the number of votes for the presence of a shape with the parameters corresponding to that element. Of course, if a shape with certain xed parameters is present in the image, all of the pixels that are part of it will vote for it, yielding a large peak in the accumulator array. For this particular example, we generalize the Hough transform to detect parabolas, which in comparison with lines consist of three different parameters. The use of three parameters instead of two implies a dimensional increase in the parameter space and consequently in the accumulator array, now being 3D and no longer 2D as in the case of line detection. 2.2. Mathematical morphology The eld of mathematical morphology provides a wide range of operators to image processing, all based around a few simple mathematical concepts from set theory. The operators are particularly useful for the analysis of binary images and common uses include edge detection, noise removal, image enhancement and image segmentation. The two most basic operations in mathematical morphology are erosion and dilation. Both of these operators 63

2. The Hough transform mathematical morphology approach

2.1. Overview of the Hough transform methodology Hough (1962) originally proposed his methodology, currently referred to as Hough transform, to detect straight lines with the intention of nding bubble tracks. Consider a point (xi , yi ) and the explicit general equation of a line, yi = hxi + k. An innite number of lines pass through (xi , yi ), and all of them

M G Orozco-del-Castillo et al
(a)

(b)

Figure 1. Original seismic prole (a) and the binarized segment of the prole used in this section, showing three distinct salt bodies (b).

take two pieces of data as inputs: an image to be eroded or dilated, and a structuring element (also known as a kernel). The two pieces of input data are each treated as representing sets of coordinates in a way that is slightly different for binary and greyscale images. For a binary image, white pixels are normally used to represent foreground regions, while black pixels denote background (note that in some implementations this convention is reversed, as is the case in this work for visual purposes). Then the set of coordinates corresponding to that image is simply the set of two-dimensional Euclidean coordinates of all the foreground pixels in the image, with a coordinates origin normally taken in one of the corners so that all coordinates have positive elements, i.e. each element of a set belongs to N 2 . Let A and B be two sets of N 2 , with components a = (a1 , a2 ) and b = (b1 , b2 ), respectively. The translation of A through x = (x1 , x2 ), represented as (A)x is dened as (A)x = {c|c = a + x, a A}. (1)

2.3. Detection of salt bodies using the Hough transform In the segment of the seismic prole shown in gure 1, several salt bodies with parabolic-like shapes can be observed. The aim of this work was to develop a way to extract them from the rest of the prole by featuring them as parabolas with dened parameters. The proposed methodology consists of digitally processing the original seismic prole using mathematical morphology, such that the nal product is appropriate to analysis through the Hough transform. 2.3.1. DIP of the original seismic prole. The values in this prole (gure 1(b)) were initially modied so it could be seen as a greyscale image of 8 bits (0255), and later binarized (thresholded to have values of 0 and 1) because the techniques used further on for segmentation and recognition are designed for binary images. For visual purposes, the black pixels correspond to the value 1, while the white pixels to 0. The standard generalized Hough transform can theoretically be applied to this image, but the quantity of information in the image would considerably affect the time and the results of the analysis, mostly because a great part of the information does not represent the objects we are trying to extract. It was therefore needed to apply an erosion operation that would diminish the quantity of non-useful information, i.e. that information not representing the salt bodies. When taking into account that the non-useful areas are not so large in terms of size (quantity of pixels), then the erosion operation results are even more appropriate. In other words, the segments of useful information are formed by large accumulations of pixels, while the others are mostly formed by narrow lines or small accumulations. Accounting for this, one should erode the image until the non-useful information has disappeared;

Let A denote a binary image and B denote a structuring element (usually a square mask of values equal to 1; in this paper a 3 3 mask was used). Then the erosion of A by B is given by A B = {x|(B)x A}. (2)

So, the erosion of A by B is the set of all the points x so that B, translated through x, is contained in A. This means that, only when B is completely contained inside A, the pixel values are retained, else they get deleted, i.e. they get eroded. Although equation (2) is not the only denition for erosion, it is normally the most adequate in practical implementations of morphology. 64

Seismic data interpretation using Hough transform and PCA

(a)

(b)

(c)

Figure 2. (a) The binarized seismic prole image after two binary erosion operations, (b) the result of the region growing on it, and (c) the nal results of the region growing applied in (b) with the centroids calculated from (a).

we experimentally determined that nine erosion operations are needed to achieve this (gure 2(a)). The inconvenience is that, by its nature, the erosion operation also erases some of the relevant information. To avoid this issue, we decided to implement and apply a region growing algorithm to recover the lost information due to the erosion operations. Region growing is a commonly used procedure that groups pixels or subregions to greater ones. The simplicity of this method resides in the pixel aggregation that starts with a set of generating points (seeds) from which the regions grow by adding to each of these points the neighbour points that have similar properties (e.g. grey level, texture, colour) (Gonzalez and Woods 1992). Since we are dealing with binary images, the region growing algorithm we used is the simplest of its possible variations; it simply looks for all of the black pixels that are connected to the seed. The seeds were calculated as the centroids

of the remaining black areas after nine erosion operations (gure 2(a)). Applying region growing with these seeds to the original image recovers both useful and, due to the connectivity of the original regions, non-useful information. To solve this issue, we need to break the connectivity of the useful areas from the non-useful ones in the original image. As we did before, this can be achieved through erosion. At this stage, the erosion operation is not intended to remove unwanted areas in the image, but rather to break the connectivity of the useful from the non-useful areas, so that the region growing algorithm can be successfully applied. We experimentally determined that two erosion operations are sufcient to achieve this effect, as shown in gure 2(b). It is in this image in which we applied region growing with the centroids calculated from gure 2(a), and the nal result is shown in gure 2(c). Notice how a large portion of the non-useful information from the original 65

M G Orozco-del-Castillo et al

Table 1. Parameters of the three parabolas found using the Hough transform. a 1 2 3 0.0025 0.0025 0.0047 h 170 534 1260 k 130 174 287

Figure 3. Workow of the Hough transform approach.

image has been eliminated, leaving the three areas of the image corresponding to the three salt bodies that we intend to extract. There remains a group of pixels in the lower part of the image which do not correspond to a salt body. However, the curve recognition is not affected by means of the Hough transform nature. The process is illustrated in gure 3. 2.3.2. The Hough transform analysis for the detection of the parabolic-like top of salt bodies. We originally described the Hough transform methodology in its original and most commonly used form, applied for the detection of lines (whose equation is given by yi = hxi + k). To achieve the recognition of parabolas, the modication of the usual form of the Hough transform is needed. The general equation of a parabola is given by 1 (x h)2 , (3) 4m where the vertex is located at (h, k), focused at (h, k + m) and directrix y = k m, with m being the distance from the vertex to the focus. For simplicity purposes, it is possible to rewrite equation (3) as yk = y k = a(x h)2 , (4)

where a = 1/4m. It is obvious that the parameter space (or Hough space) that represents parabolas is a three-dimensional space formed by the parameters (a, h, k), instead of the two-dimensional space representing lines, formed by the parameters (h, k). This implies that, to accomplish the spatial transformation, we need to clear one of the variables and change the values of the other two from a minimum to a maximum value for each one. For example, clearing k from equation (4) we obtain k = y a(x h)2 . 66 (5)

It is now necessary to vary the parameters a and h, from amin to amax and hmin to hmax , respectively. Since the point (h, k) represents the vertex of the parabola in the image, it is obvious that hmin = 1 and hmax is the number of columns. The values of amin and amax that control the aperture of the parabola were determined experimentally (according to the possible apertures of the pseudo-parabolas representing the salt bodies) as amin = 0.002 and amax = 0.03, and the intermediate values were distributed logarithmically, unlike h and k which were distributed linearly. With these values, and the possible values for k (from 1 to the number of rows in the image), a three-dimensional parameter space is created with accumulator cells where all possible parabolas from the black pixels in the image shown in gure 2(c) are stored. After the transformation process, a cube with dimensions corresponding to the rows, columns and the number of intervals for a was obtained. This cube contains in each cell the amount of votes that the parabola received, with parameters given by the location of the cell in the space. To extract those cells with the greater amount of votes without extracting nearby cells that represent different parabolas, but the same salt body, a minmax clustering was applied. The detection of the peaks in this 3D space is not a very complicated task since the values are clearly above those in cells not representing parabolas; however, it could be possible that the extraction of the parabolas from the parameter space is more complicated, so some other kind of search could be needed. Montana (1992) proposed a genetic search of a generalized Hough transform space for the detection and tracking of a class of sonar signals, which yielded very narrow peaks not too far above the random background variations. He concluded that the genetic search required far fewer evaluations to outperform an exhaustive search algorithm. The result of the clustering yielded the three parabolas with the greatest number of votes. The parameters of these parabolas are shown in table 1. These parabolas were overlaid in the original images as shown in gure 4. The application of this methodology to one seismic prole yields the parameters for three different parabolas that resemble the top of their corresponding salt body. Since the salt bodies show similar characteristics across the different proles of the seismic cube, the successive application of the aforementioned procedure would result in a set of parameters for each salt body.

3. The PCA approach

We consider that the automatic detection of seismic patterns should emulate how a human interpreter actually does it, i.e. a qualitative approach instead of a quantitative one. By

Seismic data interpretation using Hough transform and PCA

these means, seismic pattern detection is very similar to other high-level pattern detection tasks like face detection. One of the most successful approaches to automatic qualitative face detection was proposed by Turk and Pentland (1991). Using a PCA approach, their near-real-time computer system was able to locate and track a subjects head, and then recognize the person by comparing characteristics of the face to those of known individuals. This is why we believe that an information theory approach like PCA of coding and decoding seismic patterns, in this particular case salt bodies images, may give an insight into the information content of them, emphasizing their signicant local and global features, rather than quantitative ones. Mathematically, we wish to nd the principal components of the distribution of the salt bodies, or the eigenvectors of the covariance matrix of a training set of salt bodies images, treating an image as a point (or vector) in a very high dimensional space. The eigenvectors should then be ordered, with each one accounting for a different amount of the variation among the salt bodies images according to their respective eigenvalues. These can be thought of as a set of features that together characterize the variation between salt bodies images. Each individual body in the training set (minus the average salt body) can be represented exactly in terms of a linear combination of the eigenvectors. Each body can also be approximated using only the best eigenvectors, i.e. those with the largest associated eigenvalues, which therefore account for the most variance within the set of salt body images. The best M eigenvectors span an M-dimensional subspace of all possible images (salt-body-space). The construction of this PCA approach system consists of the following. (1) Acquiring an initial set of salt bodies images (the training set). (2) Calculating the eigenvectors from the covariance matrix of the training set, and keeping only the M images that correspond to the M highest eigenvalues. These M images dene a subspace of the salt-body-space. Once the construction has been achieved, the following steps are then used to detect new salt bodies. (1) Tracking of a seismic prole capturing input images. (2) Projecting the input image onto the salt-body-space. (3) Determining if the image is a seismic body by measuring the distance of the original image (as a vector) to the salt-body-space. 3.1. Theoretical background Let a salt body image I (x, y) be a two-dimensional N N array of intensity values. An image may also be considered as a vector of dimension N 2 . A set of images maps to a collection of points in this space. Images presenting the same pattern, in our case salt bodies, will not be randomly distributed in this space since they have a similar overall conguration, and can be described by a lower dimensional subspace. The main idea of the principal component analysis is to nd the vectors that best account for the distribution of salt body images within the entire image space. These vectors dene the subspace of salt

body images, which we call salt-body-space. Each vector is of length N 2 and is a linear combination of the original salt bodies images. Because these vectors are the eigenvectors of the covariance matrix corresponding to the original salt bodies images, and because they are salt-body-like in appearance, we refer to them as eigenbodies. Let the training set of salt bodies images be B1 , B2 , B3 , . . . , BM . The average body of the set is dened by = 1 M
M

Bn .
n=1

(6)

Each body differs from the average by the vector

i

= Bi

(7)

This set of very large vectors is then subject to principal component analysis. We need to calculate the eigenvalues and eigenvectors of the covariance matrix 1 C= M
M n n=1 T n

= AAT ,

(8)

where matrix A = [ 1 2 ... M ]. Matrix C, however, is N 2 N 2 , and determining the N 2 eigenvectors and eigenvalues is an intractable task for typical image sizes. The problem is solved by Turk and Pentland by calculating the eigenvalues and eigenvectors of the M M matrix given by L = AT A, instead of C = AAT , where the rst (most signicant) eigenvectors and eigenvalues, are indeed the same. This alternative methodology enables the near-real-time calculation of the eigenvectors and eigenvalues. These vectors v determine linear combinations of the M training set images to form the eigenbodies ul , ul =
M

vlk
k=1

l = 1, . . . , M.

(9)

The eigenbody images calculated from the eigenvectors of L span a basis set with which to describe salt bodies images. In this framework, identication becomes a pattern recognition task. The eigenbodies span an M -dimensional subspace of the original N 2 image space. The M signicant eigenvectors of the L matrix are chosen as those with the largest associated eigenvalues. A new salt body image B is transformed into its eigenbodies components (projected into salt-body-space) by a simple operation, k = uT (B k ), (10) The weights form a vector for k = 1, . . . , M . [1 , 2 , . . . , M ] that describes the contribution of each eigenbody in representing the input salt body image, treating the eigenbodies as a basis set for salt body images. This process is equivalent to projecting the original salt body image onto the low-dimensional salt-body-space. The distance between the new input image and the salt-body-space is simply the squared distance (Euclidean norm) between the mean-adjusted input image and the salt-body-space f = M i=1 i ui : = (B )
f

(11)

67

M G Orozco-del-Castillo et al

Figure 4. Original image with overlaid resulting parabolas from table 1.

Figure 5. Set of the 15 initial training images obtained manually from several proles of the seismic cube after applying the Gaussian function in equation (12).

3.2. Application to seismic proles The purpose is to detect the salt bodies present in a seismic cube. A prole of this cube is shown in gure 1(a). A closer look at the seismic prole makes three salt bodies quite evident (as shown in gure 1(b)). The detection of salt bodies is sensitive to the background, i.e. the system is not able to determine the limit of a salt body, so it is also taken into consideration by the detection and recognition processes. To deal with this problem without having to solve other difcult image-processing problems such as the segmentation of the salt body (which would also mean having to detect the body to segment it, and having it segmented for its detection), we performed a pointwise product of the input images (both the training images and the new input images) by a twodimensional Gaussian window centred on the salt body, thus diminishing the background and accentuating the middle of the body. The two-dimensional Gaussian is given by e 2 h(x, y) = 2 2 68
(x 2 +y 2 )

where x and y correspond to the values of the rows and columns of the image respectively, ranging between 1 and M (230), and is the standard deviation or aperture of the Gaussian, which was experimentally determined as 2.5. Greater values for would tend to leave the image intact, while smaller ones would drastically obscure the entire salt bodies, instead of just the corners of the images which do not account to the bodies. Therefore, the multiplied image would correspond to Iij e 2 , (13) Gij = 2 2 where i and j correspond to the values of the rows and columns respectively of the image, and I is the original image. We assembled a set of 15 training images obtained manually from several proles of the seismic cube. Figure 5 shows these after applying the Gaussian function to every one of them. While these images were obtained manually by selecting areas of different proles showing salt bodies, the results from the Hough transform methodology could be used as inputs for this procedure to improve the automation of the detection of the salt bodies throughout the seismic cube.
(i 2 +j 2 )

(12)

Seismic data interpretation using Hough transform and PCA

Figure 6. The 15 best eigenbodies (ordered), corresponding to the 15 eigenvectors with the largest eigenvalues associated with them, as calculated in equation (9).
(a) (b)

(c)

(d)

Figure 7. Four different images and their projection on the salt-body-space. The left images on (a) and (c) show two images corresponding to salt bodies, and the left images on (b) and (d) correspond to other images in the same seismic cube. Notice how in (a) and (c) the right-hand-side images are similar, while those on the left-hand-side, in (b) and (d), considerably differ.

The rst step is to calculate the mean image of the set of images, what we can call the average salt body. Once we have the mean image, according to the procedure described before, we are able to obtain the 15 (due to the number of training images) greatest eigenvalues and their associated (most representative) eigenvectors of the covariance matrix given by equation (9). These vectors determine linear combinations of the 15 training set salt bodies images to form the eigenbodies shown in gure 6. Notice how the images in the rst row represent the general form of the bodies, while those in the last row represent their details. These eigenbodies are used to project an image into the salt-body-space by the operation described in equation (10). According to how an image is projected into this space, we can know if the image corresponds to an element of the space, i.e. represents a salt body. When a salt body image is projected into this space, the result is a very similar image, but if not

the projected image differs considerably from the original, as shown in gure 7. The images in gures 7(a) and (c) correspond to salt bodies and their projection on the salt-bodyspace, meanwhile the others in gures 7(b) and (d) correspond to the areas of the seismic prole that do not contain these bodies, and their respective projections. Since not all of the eigenvectors, and consequently the eigenbodies, have the same contribution in representing the input body image, it is advisable to take into consideration only M of them because of processing-time issues, where M is less or equal to the number M of training images. The effect of M to an input image is shown in gure 8. The rst image is the original image; the following four are projections of this image on the salt-body-space using values of 1, 5, 10 and 15, respectively for M . It can be seen that the projections are adequate and fairly similar in all cases; therefore, the choice 69

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Figure 8. Different projections of the same image. The image on the left shows the original image, while the four images on the right correspond to projections of the original image onto the salt-body-space using values of 1, 5, 10 and 15 for M , i.e. using 1, 5, 10 and 15 eigenvectors, respectively.
(a)

(b)

(c)

Figure 9. Results of the image tracking. The seismic prole on which the methodology was applied is shown in (a). The results of image tracking are shown in (b) and (c), for values of 2 and 15 respectively for M . Notice how in (c) the bright spots corresponding to salt bodies are more evident and there appear fewer bright areas than in (b).

of M is not critical in terms of performance, but is important in terms of processing time. 3.3. Image tracking and parameter determination The procedure explained so far allows recognizing whether an image is a salt body or not, but in order to semi-automate the recognition in seismic proles/cubes it is needed to show the system every possible image in them. There is an obvious tradeoff between precision and time, but, not being the main goal of this work, we decided to track a complete seismic prole pixel by pixel, capturing all of the possible images present in it and measuring the distance (according to equation (11)) of its projection onto the salt-body-space (equation (10)) to the salt-body-space itself. We do this in a horizontally rotated seismic prole, distinct from those used 70

for the training of the system (gure 9(a)), but similar enough for the salt bodies to be evident in it. The results are shown in gures 9(b) and (c); the rst image shows the seismic prole, while the other two show the results using values of 2 and 15 for M , respectively. Bright areas correspond to areas where the appearance of salt bodies is more probable, i.e. areas where the value of as calculated in equation (13) are lower. The image using M = 2 shows a greater number of bright areas overall than the one for M = 15 but, despite these differences, they both show three very distinct bright spots, each one corresponding to the salt bodies present in the seismic prole. The nal results for M = 3 and a pixel-by-pixel tracking of the seismic prole are shown in gure 10(a). As stated before, the bright areas correspond to areas where there is a greater possibility of nding a salt body. Despite several of these

Seismic data interpretation using Hough transform and PCA

(a)

(b)

Figure 10. Image tracking results as an image and as a 2D function. The image in (a) corresponds to the grey-level image (0255) obtained by a pixel-by-pixel tracking using M = 3. The image in (b) shows the same results, but as a 2D function. Brighter spots in (a) correspond to greater values in (b).

areas, there clearly appear three bright spots corresponding to the three salt bodies in the seismic prole. The results are more obvious if this image is plotted as a two-dimensional function, as shown in gure 10(b). In this new image, the three bright spots, corresponding to the three salt bodies, appear as peaks in a relatively smooth image. The determination of how strong or how great the peaks should be to represent a salt body and how to nd them in a dataset is a pattern recognition technique that will depend on the task at hand. In this case, a simple thresholding of the image successfully isolates the location of the peaks from the rest of the image; for other cases, where the contrast of the peaks corresponding to the location of salt bodies to the rest of the image could not be as obvious, an image segmentation or clustering technique should be used. This also holds true for the future automation of the salt body detection process in a seismic cube. This task of peak detection is very similar to the detection of the cell with the greater amount of votes in the Hough parameter space, which was addressed earlier on. Peak detection in data is a relevant matter of research, where several techniques have been proposed and proved useful. Some approaches use shape information of the histogram of the data to achieve multilevel thresholding (Prewitt and Mendelsohn 1966, Weszka et al 1974, Otsu 1979). Kanungo et al (2006) proposed a segmentation technique based on both thresholding the data and applying genetic

algorithms for the location of peaks and valleys. Other approaches for peak detection correspond to data mining, such as hierarchical clustering, partitioning relocation clustering, and density-based partitioning (Berkhin 2002). The choice of which peak detection technique should be used in the automation of the salt body detection process throughout the whole seismic cube will depend on the characteristics of the data obtained from the application of the PCA methodology, and is out of the scope of this work. 3.4. Extraction of salt bodies For an appropriate interpretation of seismic proles, it is helpful to display the recognized patterns in three dimensions. In the previous sections we introduced a novel approach to salt dome identication by using the Hough transform and PCA. By using these approaches we are able to identify the approximate location of salt bodies inside a seismic prole. This location is used to infer coordinates of points inside the salt bodies that will be used as seeds for 3D region growing in a seismic cube. Once the salt bodies are identied in the seismic cube and in order to obtain always closed forms for region growing in 3D, we used conventional seismic interpretation in several proles. Results from the application of region growing to the extraction of the estimated salt bodies are depicted in gure 11. 71

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paper. Special thanks are given to K Marfurt for his fruitful discussions on feature extraction and pattern recognition methods applied to oil exploration. This contribution was supported by project IMP/D.000475, D.00468, SENERConacyt 128376. We also thank the French CNRS for the nancial support by grant 94154.

References
Aguado A S, Montiel M E and Nixon M S 1995 Ellipse detection via gradient direction in the Hough transform Proc. 5th Int. Conf. on Image Processing and its Applications (Edinburgh, UK) pp 3758 Aguado A S, Montiel M E and Nixon M S 2000 Bias error analysis of the generalized Hough transform J. Math. Imaging Vis. 12 2542 Bahorich M and Farmer S 1995 3D seismic discontinuity for faults and stratigraphics features: the coherence cube Leading Edge 14 10538 Bakker P, Van Vliet L J and Verbeek P W 1999 Edge preserving orientation adaptive ltering Proc. IEEE Comp. Soc. Conf. on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR99) vol 1 pp 153540 Ballard D H 1981 Generalizing the Hough transform to detect arbitrary shapes Pattern Recognit. 13 11122 Berkhin P 2002 Survey of clustering data mining techniques Technical Report (Accrue Software) Chopra S 2002 Coherence cube and beyond First Break 20 2733 Cohen I and Coifman R R 2002 Local discontinuity measures for 3D seismic data Geophysics 67 193345 Cohen I, Coult N and Vassiliou A 2006 Detection and extraction of fault surfaces in 3D seismic data Geophysics 71 217 Duda R O and Hart P E 1972 Use of the Hough transformation to detect lines and curves in pictures Commun. ACM 15 115 Dumay J and Fournier F 1988 Multivariate statistical analyses applied to seismic facies recognition Geophysics 53 11519 Fehmers G and H cker C 2003 Fast structural interpretation with o structure-oriented ltering Geophysics 68 128693 Foster J and Mosher C 1992 Suppression of multiple reections using the Radon transform Geophysics 57 38695 Gersztenkorn A and Marfurt K J 1999 Eigenstructure-based coherence computations as an aid to 3D structural and stratigraphic mapping Geophysics 64 146879 Gonzalez R C and Woods R E 1992 Digital Image Processing (Reading, MA: Addison Wesley) Hough P V C 1962 Method and means for recognising complex patterns US Patent 3969654 Jacquemin P and Mallet J L 2005 Automatic faults extraction using double Hough transform SEG Technical Program Expanded Abstracts vol 24 pp 7558 Jeong W, Whitaker R and Dobin M 2006 Interactive 3D seismic fault detection on the Graphics Hardware Proc. IEEE VGTC 5th Int. Workshop on Volume Graphics (VG 06) (Eurographics Association, Boston, MA) pp 1118 Kanungo P, Nanda P K and Samal U C 2006 Image segmentation using thresholding and genetic algorithm Proc. Conf. on Soft Computing Technique for Engineering Applications, SCT 2006, (Rourkela, India, 2426 March 2006) Kiryati N and Bruckstein A M 1992 Whats in a set of points? IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell. 14 496500 Lu W, Li Y, Zhang S and Xiao H 2005 Higher-order-statistics and supertrace-based coherence-estimation algorithm Geophysics 70 138 Marfurt K J, Kirlin R, Farmer S L and Bahorich M S 1998 3D seismic attributes using a semblance-based coherence algorithm Geophysics 63 115065

Figure 11. Three-dimensional geometry of the recognized salt bodies using region growing on the seismic volume.

4. Conclusions
The Hough transform was successfully applied to seismic proles to detect parabolic shapes, which were associated with the presence of salt bodies. We believe that this methodology could be useful for the detection of other geologic structures, including other salt bodies which do not present parabolic shapes. The Hough transform could be generalized to detect more complicated geometric structures like hyperbolas or high-order polynomials; the biggest disadvantage would be that the parameter space resulting from the application of the generalized Hough transform would be represented by a higher dimensional space. This can be prohibitive when generated and/or processed by a conventional PC. We also applied PCA for the semi-automatic recognition of salt bodies in the same seismic prole, where only the manual selection of images containing them is needed. The method appears to be capable of extracting conspicuous geological features from the data. A PCA system working directly with 3D data should improve the accuracy of the detections, although it would also increase signicantly the time required for the training of the system and the detection process itself. The detection process of both the Hough transform and PCA methodologies yielded similar results, but with the rst one the top of salt body (vertex of the parabola) is found, while the bright points obtained from the PCA methodology correspond to the centre of the salt bodies. As we nd these results encouraging, we believe that more complex patterns of geological units could be recognized and extracted by using other generalizations of the Hough transform and PCA processing.

Acknowledgments
We would like to acknowledge Jim Spurlin for his critical reading and suggestions to rene this work. We also thank Sandra Pineda for her detailed revision of the grammar in this 72

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