Enhanced local correlation stacking method

Stacking is a common technique to improve the signal-to-noise ratio (S/N) and the imaging quality of seismic data. Conventional stacking that averages equally a collection of normal moveout corrected or migrated shot gathers with a common reflection point is not always satisfactory. Instead, we propose a novel time-dependent weighted average stacking method that utilizes local correlation between each individual trace and a chosen reference trace as a measure of weight and a new weight normalization scheme that ensures meaningful amplitudes of the output. Three different reference traces have been proposed. These are based on conventional stacking, S/N estimation, and Kalman filtering. The outputs of the enhanced stacking methods, as well as their reference traces, were compared on both synthetic data and real marine migrated subsalt data. We conclude that both S/N estimation and Kalman reference stacking methods as well as the output of the enhanced stacking method yield consistently better results than conventional stacking. They exhibit cleaner and better defined reflection events and a larger number of reflections. We found that the Kalman reference method produces the best overall seismic image contrast and reveals many more reflected events, but at the cost of a higher noise level and a longer processing time. Thus, enhanced stacking using S/N estimation as reference method is a possible alternative that has the advantages of running faster, but also emphasizes some reflected events under the subsalt structure.