Open Access

ARTICLE

Applying Non-Local Means Filter on Seismic Exploration

Mustafa Youldash¹, Saleh Al-Dossary^2,*, Lama AlDaej¹, Farah AlOtaibi¹, Asma AlDubaikil¹, Noora AlBinali¹, Maha AlGhamdi¹

1 College of Computer Science and Information Technology, Imam Abdulrahman Bin Faisal University, Dammam, P. O. 1982, Saudi Arabia
2 Geophysical Application Division, Exploration Application Services Department, Saudi Aramco, Dhahran, Saudi Arabia

* Corresponding Author: Saleh Al-Dossary. Email:

Computer Systems Science and Engineering 2022, 40(2), 619-628. https://doi.org/10.32604/csse.2022.017733

Received 09 February 2021; Accepted 09 April 2021; Issue published 09 September 2021

Abstract

The seismic reflection method is one of the most important methods in geophysical exploration. There are three stages in a seismic exploration survey: acquisition, processing, and interpretation. This paper focuses on a pre-processing tool, the Non-Local Means (NLM) filter algorithm, which is a powerful technique that can significantly suppress noise in seismic data. However, the domain of the NLM algorithm is the whole dataset and 3D seismic data being very large, often exceeding one terabyte (TB), it is impossible to store all the data in Random Access Memory (RAM). Furthermore, the NLM filter would require a considerably long runtime. These factors make a straightforward implementation of the NLM algorithm on real geophysical exploration data infeasible. This paper redesigned and implemented the NLM filter algorithm to fit the challenges of seismic exploration. The optimized implementation of the NLM filter is capable of processing production-size seismic data on modern clusters and is 87 times faster than the straightforward implementation of NLM.

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Keywords

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