Wavefront healing operators for improving reflection coherence

David C. Henley

Seismic reflection image continuity is often adversely affected by inadequate acquisition or processing procedures, by the interference of various kinds of noise, or by the irregular nature of the recording surface. In situations where conventional methods fail, a simple processing technique called "wavefront healing" can increase reflection continuity enough to significantly improve the interpretation. The operation can be applied to either trace gathers or stacked sections. Two different operators based on the Huygens wavelet construction model of seismic wavefront propagation have been implemented in ProMAX at CREWES and are demonstrated here on both real and model data.