Enhancement of first arrivals using the τ-p transform on energy-ratio seismic shot records

Abstract

We propose a robust method of first-break picking for data sets with high noise levels through the use of the τ-p transform on energy-ratio seismic records. Using synthetic shot records with various noise levels, we showed that the performance of this proposed method enhances first arrivals, which helps in picking them. This was particularly true when the noise level was high where picking on raw amplitudes completely fails. We also applied the method on two published real shot records, for which first-break picking was difficult. We showed that for one of the shot records our method succeeds in determining first breaks that are consistent with manual picks and better than those obtained from a conventional method. The method can be used to guide better the subsequent careful picking of first arrivals and requires one forward and one inverse τ-p transform operations. In contrast to methods based on trace-by-trace picking that often fail to pick some traces, the proposed method automatically interpolates missing picks.

Iterative Gaussian mixture model and multi‐channel attributes for arrival picking in extremely noisy environments

“…Traditional manual picking often takes a lot of time and lowers the efficiency of the whole workflow. Therefore, many automatic picking methods were developed to accelerate this procedure (Fedorenko and Husebye, 1999; Sabbione and Velis, 2010; Mousa et al ., 2011; Blias, 2012; Mousa and Al‐Shuhail, 2012; Senkaya and Karsli, 2014; Velis et al ., 2015; Mousavi et al ., 2016; Tan and He, 2016; Iqbal et al ., 2017; Lee et al ., 2017; Khajouei and Goudarzi, 2018; Khalaf et al ., 2018; Mousavi et al ., 2019), leverage techniques relying on short‐term and long‐term average ratio (STA/LTA) (Allen, 1978; Jones and van der Baan, 2015; Vaezi and van der Baan, 2015) and attribute‐based methods (Saragiotis et al ., 2013; Forte et al ., 2016). Alvarez et al .…”

First-arrival automatic picking based on improved energy ratio method and outlier detection theory

“…The application of these methods has improved the accuracy of first-arrival picking, but in many cases, some wrong first arrivals are still unavoidable. Therefore, some methods like the least square method (Sabbione and Velis 2010) and − p transform (Mousa et al 2012) have been applied to eliminate the abnormal first arrivals and achieved good results. How to automatically eliminate abnormal first arrivals is also an important part of the first-arrival automatic picking.…”

Automatic first-arrival picking method based on an image connectivity algorithm and multiple time windows

“…Liao et al (2011) proposed an automatic first-arrival picking method based on time-frequency analysis using minimum uncertainty wavelets. Mousa et al (2012) proposed a first-arrival enhancement method using the -p τ transform on energy-ratio seismic shot records, thus obtaining an increase in SNR. Senkaya and Karsli (2014) used the cross-correlation technique for automatic first-arrival detection.…”