Seismic Feature Extraction Using Steiner Tree Methods

Identifying "interesting" features, such as faults, unconformities, and other events in subsurface images is a challenging task in seismic data processing. Existing state-of-the-art methods usually involve manual intervention in the form of a visual inspection by an expert, but this is time-consuming, expensive, and error-prone. In this paper, we propose an efficient, automatic approach for seismic feature extraction. The core idea of our approach involves interpreting a given 2D seismic image as a function defined over the vertices of a specially chosen underlying graph. This enables us to formulate the feature extraction task as an instance of the Prize-Collecting Steiner Tree problem encountered in combinatorial optimization. We develop an efficient algorithm to solve this problem, and demonstrate the utility of our method on a number of synthetic and real examples.