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

In the framework of data interpretation for petroleum exploration, this paper contributes two contributions for visual exploration aiming to manually segment 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 surface tracking, i.e. fault-picking, from 3D large seismic data sets. The proposed method establishes a new paradigm of interaction breaking with the conventional 2D slices method usually used by geoscientists. Based on the 2D + time visualization method, dynamic picking facilitates localizing of faults by taking advantage of the intrinsic ability of the human visual system to detect dynamic changes in textured data. The second, projective slice, is a focus + context visualization technique that offers the advantage of facilitating the anticipation of upcoming slices over the sloping 3D surface. From the reported experimental results, dynamic picking leads to a good compromise between fitting precision and completeness of picking while the projective slice significantly reduces the amount of workload for all equivalent level of precision. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.