Analysis and application of the Radon transform

Zhihong (Nancy) Cao

An ultimate goal of seismic exploration is to generate accurate images of the subsurface to clearly identify hydrocarbon plays. Seismic data processing plays an important role in achieving this goal. One of the key problems in seismic data processing is to attenuate multiple reflections from seismic data. Multiple reflections often destructively interfere with primary reflections and lead to incorrect seismic images.

Different approaches have been investigated and applied to the multiple attenuation problem, including the Radon transform which is an industry standard and has been attracting a lot of attention in the last two decades. In this thesis, Radon transform techniques are reviewed and analyzed and a new Radon algorithm, the optimized semblance-weighted Radon transform, is introduced. An overview of various Radon transform methods is given and the algorithms tested on synthetic and real data.