Extracting horizons and sequence boundaries from 3D seismic images

Automated horizon-extraction methods often have difficulty extracting horizons that terminate at unconformities or sequence boundaries. Using sequence boundaries as constraints is one way to solve this problem, but there exists no automated method for sequence-boundary extraction. We first introduce a globally optimal method to efficiently extract a horizon from a seismic image. We then use scattered control points as constraints to enable our horizon-extraction method to extract sequence boundaries. Finally, we propose an active-surface method to refine extracted horizons to align them with amplitude peaks or troughs and thereby reveal more geologic details.