Dynamic picking system for 3D seismic data: design and evaluation

• Published in: International journal of human-computer studies 2009-06, p.423-430
• Main Authors: Salom, Pierre, Mégret, Rémi, Donias, Marc, Berthoumieu, Yannick
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Computer Science; Engineering Sciences; Signal and Image processing
• ISSN: 1071-5819; 1095-9300

In the framework of data interpretation for petroleum exploration, this paper makes two contributions for visual exploration aiming to the manual segmenting of surfaces embedded in volumetric data. Resulting from a user-centered design approach, the first contribution, dynamic picking, is a new method of viewing slices dedicated to the surface tracking, i.e. fault-picking, from 3D large seismic datasets. The proposed method establishes a new paradigm of interaction breaking with the 2D slices conventional method usually used by geoscientists. Based on the 2D + time visualization method, the dynamic picking facilitates the localization of the faults by taking advantage of the intrinsic ability of the human visual system to detect dynamic changes in the textured data. The second, projective slice, is a focus+context visualization technique which offers the advantage to facilitate the anticipation of upcoming slices over the sloping 3D surface. From reported experimental results, the dynamic picking leads to a good compromise between the fitting precision and the completeness of the picking while the projective slice significantly reduces the amount of workload for an equivalent level of precision.