AUTOMATED INTERPRETATION OF GEOLOGICAL 
FAULTING USING 3D SEISMIC DATA
Applications are urgently sought from students with an 
appropriate background in earth science or image 
processing/computer vision for a PhD project which aims to 
develop prototype software enabling automatic extraction of fault 
surfaces and other geological discontinuities from 3D seismic 
datasets. This is a collaborative project supervised jointly by Dr 
Mike Spann ([log in to unmask]) in the School of Electronic 
and Electrical Engineering and Dr Jonathan Turner (address 
below) in the School of Earth Sciences at the University of 
Birmingham. Shell Research in the Netherlands will also 
contribute data and ideas to this project. The project is funded by 
a University of Birmingham Interdisciplinary Research Fund, a 
new initiative designed to stimulate collaborative research 
between disparate disciplines.
Petroleum production projects are often hindered by a lack of 
detailed information on the three-dimensional geometry of intra-
reservoir faulting. Faults are discrete fractures across which there 
is measurable displacement of sedimentary strata and they exert 
the principal control over fluid flow in petroleum reservoirs. The 
advent of 3D seismic data has allowed geophysicists and reservoir 
engineers to appreciate the sheer complexity of intra-reservoir 
faulting on a scale which was previously unresolvable on poorer 
quality 2D data. However, interpretation of seismic data is a 
highly subjective exercise that requires the interpreter to manually 
‘pick’ hundreds of individual fault surfaces on each of the seismic 
profiles.
This project addresses the interpretation problem by combining 
expertise from computer vision and image processing and 
petroleum geology to develop, for the first time, automated 
methods of fault interpretation. The principle outcome will be the 
development and testing of new algorithms enabling seismic 
interpretation software to automatically extract fault surfaces 
from 3D seismic data. This work also has applications in civil 
engineering and hazardous waste disposal where seismic data are 
used routinely to characterize fault and fracture systems.

Please contact either of the supervisors for further details.

Dr Jonathan Turner
The University of Birmingham
School of Earth Sciences
Birmingham B15 2TT
Tel. (44) 0121 414 6155 (voicemail)
Fax. (44) 0121 414 4942
Visit our website at http://www.bham.ac.uk/EarthSciences



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