A3Mark: Seismic attribute benchmarking

Abstract

Seismic attribute computation is one of the most active research and engineering topics in the computational geophysics world. Although numerous algorithms for seismic attribute computation have been developed, relatively little work has been done on scientifically characterizing their quality and accuracy. Seismic attribute characterization effort is largely qualitative and subjective. We have developed a robust and reliable scientific process for functionally comparing similar attributes. Structural seismic attributes are addressed, including discontinuity, dip angle, dip azimuth, and curvature. To establish a common software platform, and collection of data sets for efficient fully automatic evaluation, a stand-alone flexible online web service is designed. It is based on a C#-MATLAB implementation, and it is called A3Mark. The publicly available web service enables the automatic evaluation of individual categories of seismic attributes using customized quality metrics. It can be easily extended to include new algorithms. Several new synthetic data sets covering various structural measurements are also created, including noise, with ground truth, and they are made publicly available through the web service. Finally, a comparative evaluation of some current seismic attribute algorithms is given with quantitative and qualitative results.