Seismic data display and reflection perceptibility

Relatively little attention has been paid to the final output of today’s sophisticated seismic data processing procedures—the seismic section display. We first examine significant factors relating to those displays and then describe a series of experiments that, by varying those factors, let us specify displays that maximize interpreters’ abilities to detect reflections buried in random noise. The study.—From psychology of perception and image enhancement literature and from our own research, these conclusions were reached: (1) Seismic reflection perceptibility is best for time scales in the neighborhood of 1.875 inches/sec because, for common seismic frequencies, the eye‐brain spatial frequency response is a maximum near that value. (2) An optimized gray scale for variable density sections is nonlinearly related to digital data values on a plot tape. The nonlinearity is composed to two parts (a) that which compensates for nonlinearity inherent in human perception, and (b) the nonlinearity required to produce histogram equalization, a modern image enhancement technique. The experiments.—The experiments involved 37 synthetic seismic sections composed of simple reflections embedded in filtered random noise. Reflection signal‐to‐noise (S/N) ratio was varied over a wide range, as were other display parameters, such as scale, plot mode, photographic density contrast, gray scale, and reflection dip angle. Twenty‐nine interpreters took part in the experiments. The sections were presented, one at a time, to each interpreter; the interpreter then proceeded to mark all recognizable events. Marked events were checked against known data and errors recorded. Detectability thresholds in terms of S/N ratios were measured as a function of the various display parameters. Some of the more important conclusions are: (1) With our usual types of displays, interpreters can pick reflections about 6 or 7 dB below noise with a 50 percent probability. (2) Perceptibility varies from one person to another by 2.5 to 3.0 dB. (3) For displays with a 3.75 inch/sec scale and low contrast photographic paper (a common situation), variable density (VD) and variable area‐wiggly trace (VA‐WT) sections are about equally effective from a perceptibility standpoint. (4) However, for displays with small scales and for displays with higher contrast, variable density is significantly superior. A VD section with all parameters optimized shows about 8 dB perceptibility advantage over an optimized VA‐WT section. (5) Detectability drops as dip angle increases. VD is slightly superior to VA‐WT, even at large scales, for steep dip angles. (6) An interpreter gains typically about 2 dB by foreshortening, although there is a wide variation from one individual to another.