Seismic time-lapse image registration using amplitude-adjusted plane-wave destruction

Introduction

Over the past 25 years, time-lapse seismic monitoring has evolved into the standard method to detect spatial fluid changes in the subsurface (Lumley, 2001). In some locations, permanent stations have been installed for continuous time-lapse monitoring (Berron et al., 2015).

Many methods for analyzing time-lapse seismic data have been proposed. Cross-equalization includes spatial and temporal registration to compensate for different acquisition geometries and amplitude balancing to scale the data to the same amplitude (Rickett and Lumley, 2001). Hall (2006) proposed a 3D vectorial conditioning using a deformable mesh with sensitivity to image quality. Williamson et al. (2007) explained time shifts and amplitude changes by integrating classical warping and impedence inversion in the limit of small offset and dip and low frequency. Hale (2009,2013) proposed an extension of the dynamic time warping algorithm developed for speech recognition and multidimensional local phase correlation scanning. Fomel and Jin (2009) proposed local similarity scanning, which was applied to time-lapse registration in Cranfield by Zhang et al. (2014,2013). More recently, Khalil and Hoeber (2015) used the wave equation to compute shifts normal to reflectors. Baek and Keho (2015) proposed warping as an inverse problem where velocity changes are optimized to resolve events in time-lapse seismic images.

In this paper, we adopt and extend plane-wave destruction (Fomel, 2002; Chen et al., 2013a) for automatic estimation of time-variant shifts and rescaling functions between seismic images. In time-lapse seismic monitoring, sensitive acquisition and processing is required to detect small shifts induced by fluid migration. We show that the proposed amplitude-adjusted plane-wave destruction is particularly effective in measuring small shifts and test the proposed algorithm using synthetic and field data examples.

Seismic time-lapse image registration using amplitude-adjusted plane-wave destruction