Seismic Image Dip Estimation by Multiscale Principal Component Analysis

Dip estimation of geological structures plays an important role in geophysical applications. Principal component analysis (PCA) is a common approach to estimating local dips by decomposing the local gradients of a seismic migration image and obtaining its principal eigenvector. However, PCA is difficult to obtain robust and high-resolution dip estimations for low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) migration images, while multiscale schemes in digital image processing can achieve a better compromise between noise robustness and dip resolution. Therefore, we propose to adopt a multiscale PCA (MPCA) method coupled with a propagation-weight-based fusion mechanism for seismic dip estimation of low SNR migration image. MPCA consists of three steps: 1) constructing an image pyramid by repeating the low-pass filter from fine to coarse scales; 2) estimating the dip using the PCA method at each scale of the image pyramid; and 3) fusing the multiscale dip estimations using propagation weights from coarse to fine scales. We test the MPCA method on an omnidirectional dip pattern and three seismic migration images and compare with the conventional PCA and multiscale methods. The results demonstrate that MPCA yields robust and high-resolution dip estimations for low SNR seismic migration images.