Fault surface extraction from a global perspective

Abstract

Fault surface extraction plays a vital role in structural interpretation and structural modeling, which can enhance our understanding of geologic structures. Significant effort has been invested in fault surface extraction in the past few years. These contributions can be roughly divided into two types: one constructs fault sticks or fault patches and links them to form fault surfaces, and the other constructs a complete fault surface by roughly determining the location of a fault. The former is likely to extract incomplete fault surfaces in areas with low data quality or complex fault structures. The latter has problems dealing with faults in the case of complex fault structures, such as intersecting faults. To effectively address these problems, we have developed a novel fault extraction workflow from a global perspective, which can extract fault surfaces on the premise of obtaining the fault distribution of the entire data set. First, we introduce a multilayer complex network to characterize the overall distribution of faults, in which nodes represent faults, node attributes cover information, such as the location of the faults, and edge attributes give the relationship between faults. Then, for each fault represented by the node, we develop a fault surface extraction method based on computational topology, which can guarantee the completeness of the fault surfaces. We apply our method to synthetic data and field seismic data to evaluate the method quantitatively and qualitatively, respectively. The results indicate that the proposed approach extracts the fault effectively, ensures the completeness of the fault surface, and has high performance in areas with complex faults. Thus, the approach can work well in complex situations, such as intersecting faults.