Seismic inversion with adaptive edge-preserving smoothing preconditioning on impedance model

Poststack seismic impedance inversion is an effective approach for reservoir prediction. Due to the sensitivity to noise and the oscillation near the bed boundary, Gaussian distribution constrained seismic inversion is unfavorable to delineate the subtle-reservoir and small-scale geologic features. To overcome this shortcoming, we have developed a new method that incorporates a priori knowledge in the seismic inversion through a preconditioning impedance model using the adaptive edge-preserving smoothing (Ad-EPS) filter. The Ad-EPS filter preconditioned impedance model for a blocky solution makes the formation interfaces and geologic edges more precise and sharper in the inverted impedance results and keeps the inversion procedure robust even if random noise exists in the seismic data. Furthermore, compared with the conventional EPS filter, the Ad-EPS filter is able to resolve thick and thin geologic features through window size scanning, which is used to find the best-fitting window size for each sample to be filtered. The results of numerical examples and real seismic data test indicate that our inversion method can suppress noise to obtain a "blocky" inversion result and preserve small geologic features. © 2019 Society of Exploration Geophysicists.