An Application of Optical Flow to Time-Lapse Analysis in 2-D Seismic Images

Abstract

Time-lapse (4-D) seismic reservoir monitoring is a relative new technology that is gaining recognition in oil and gas producing areas around the world. In this paper, we propose an application of Horn-Schunck's optical flow estimation method in order to obtain the movement field between pairs of seismic images. Optical flow estimation can provide important information about velocity of each image pixel. This way, we show that is possible to catch important displacements between pairs of seismic images separated by a time interval. In this work, each seismic image was deformed through the application of a synthetic field. The results obtained show that this method is able to recover with reasonable precision tiny displacements commonly found in time-lapse seismic data.