Journal of Applied Geophysics 172 (2020) 103881

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Journal of Applied Geophysics

journalhomepage:www.elsevier.com/locate/jappgeo

Detection in seismic data using curvelet transform and tensor-based

elliptical adaptive structuring elements
a a,b, b
Bahareh Boustani , Abdolrahim Javaherian , Majid Nabi-Bidhendi ,
c d
Siyavash Torabi , Hamid Reza Amindavar
a Department of Petroleum Engineering, Amirkabir University of Technology, Tehran, Iran
b Institute of Geophysics, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran
c DMT Petrologic GmbH & Co., KGKarl-Wiechert-Allee, 7630625 Hannover, Germany
d Department of Electrical Engineering, Amirkabir University of Technology, Tehran, Iran

article info abstract

Article history: Channels are one of the vital issues in the exploration of oil and gas. They can be considered as reservoirs if they are filled
Received 12 October 2018 with porous and permeable material and placed in a suitable position. A detailed study of the channels can help identify the
Received in revised form 24 September 2019 sedimentation processes of the area, the intensity, and direction of the sea currents. Manual interpretation of the channels is
Accepted 31 October 2019 Available online 02
difficult and requires skill. Therefore, in this paper, the adaptive curvelet and morphological gradient algorithm (ACMG) is
November 2019
used for the automatic interpretation of the channels. First, the morphological gradient is applied to extract the edges of the
channels; then, the curvelet transform is used to in-crease the signal-to-noise ratio. The morphological top-hat operator
Keywords:
Channel edge extracts the local maxima of curvelet sub-bands. In this workflow, we applied an elliptical adaptive structuring element
Elliptical adaptive structuring element (EASE) based on Gradient structure tensor (GST). For the construction of the 2D GST, the horizontal and vertical gradients of
Gradient structure tensor the image were calcu-lated by the first-order Gaussian derivative. The eigenvalue decomposition of each structure tensor can
Morphological gradient provide an estimate of the direction and anisotropy rate of the image objects. Hence, parameters of the elliptical structur-ing
Curvelet transform element are obtained by eigenvalue decomposition of the GST. To evaluate ACMG, we compared the final out-put with the
Top-hat results of the non-adaptive curvelet and morphological gradient algorithm (CMG). Also, we compared it with the common
edge-detectors such as Canny, Sobel, Laplacian of Gaussian, and similarity attri-bute. The comparison shows that both CMG
and ACMG well extracted the edge of the channels with the higher signal-to-noise ratio.

© 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction
Channel detection is essential in the petroleum exploration industry.
Since, if the channels are filled with the porous and permeable material, they
can be a good place to accumulate hydrocarbon. In addition, a de-tailed study
of the channels can help to better know of sedimentation process in the area
(Alsouki et al., 2008). Also, channels in stratigraphic studies are important for
the development and production of oil reser-voirs (Mirkamali et al., 2014). A
channel in a seismic section is consid-ered as an interruption of reflection
continuity, but their recognition is easier in time or horizon slices of the 3D
seismic data set. However, manual interpretation of the channels is a tedious
task which requires skill and training. So, several attributes have been
introduced for
Corresponding author at: Department of Petroleum Engineering, Amirkabir University of
Technology, Tehran, Iran.
E-mail addresses: javaherian@aut.ac.ir, javaheri@ut.ac.ir (A. Javaherian).
smoother and more accurate channel interpretation (Chopra and Marfurt,
2007).
Coherence is an edge-sensitive attribute which is used to mapping channel
edges (Bahorich and Farmer, 1995). Spectral decomposition complements the
coherence and edge-based attributes since it is sensi-tive to channel thickness
rather than its width (Partyka et al., 1999). Liu and Marfurt (2007) combined
peak frequency and peak amplitude with the coherence to define channel
thickness in addition to its width. Most-positive and most-negative curvature
are also helpful in channel identi-fication (Chopra and Marfurt, 2008; Lozano
and Marfurt, 2008). Kadlec et al. (2008) used Gaussian-smoothed first-order
structure tensor and eigen-decomposition of the second-order structure tensor
to segment channel features in 3D seismic volumes. Al-Dossary (2015)
compared running average, wavelet transform, and polynomial fitting noise
re-duction algorithms before Sobel filter to enhance channel patterns in
seismic data. Ghazanfari and Javaherian (2016) combined seismic attri-butes
using the artificial neural network to detect buried channels. Karbalaali et al.
(2017a, 2017b, 2018) detected channel edges in 2D

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jappgeo.2019.103881 0926-
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2 B. Boustani et al. / Journal of Applied Geophysics 172 (2020) 103881
and 3D seismic data using cone-adapted and pyramid-adapted shearlet
transform. They first maximize shearlet coefficients in each pixel at the finest
scale of decomposition, then histogram-based thresholding and morphological
thinning are applied.
The curvelet transform as a multi-scale and multi-directional trans-form
was used in many different seismic application such as ground roll attenuation
(Yarham et al., 2004, 2006; Naghizadeh and Sacchi, 2011; Boustani et al.,
2013; Hejazi et al., 2013; Yuan et al., 2018), random noise attenuation
(Kumar and Herrmann, 2009; Wang et al., 2010; Cao et al., 2015; Zhang et
al., 2018) and multiple attenuation (Herrmann et al., 2008; Yu and Yan, 2011;
Nguyen and Dyer, 2016).
Mathematical morphological filtering (MMF) in seismic data pro-cessing
first introduced by Wang et al. (2005). Li et al. (2005) used MMF, i.e., an
average of the open-close and close-open filters in random noise attenuation
of the seismic trace. They examined the effect of shape, width, and amplitude
of the structuring element (SE) on the filter output. Wang et al. (2008)
introduced multi-scaled morphology using self-dilation of a semicircle
structuring element. Each morphology scale is obtained by computing the
MMF by structuring element of that scale and subtracting the result from the
previous stage. He then at-tenuated the ground roll from seismic data by
removing the related morphological scales and reconstruction of others. Duan
et al. (2010) and Yu et al. (2014) also utilized the multi-scaled morphology
for ground roll noise attenuation of seismic data. The semicircle SE was used
in the temporal direction of every single trace to suppress low-frequency
noise by the compound top-hat filtering (CTF) (Li et al., 2016). MMF with
straight-line structuring element was employed for coherent noise attenuation
by sliding the SE along the noise (spatial) di-rection (Huang et al., 2017).
Huang et al. (2018) used multi-scaled MMF for weak signal detection of
microseismic data. They used a weighted average of morphological scales to
reconstruct data. The weights are chosen in the previous work manually
(Wang et al., 2008; Chen et al., 2015) or adaptively using a varimax norm
(Yuan et al., 2016). But they proposed a non-stationary weighting operator
which can be ob-tained by solving an inverse problem in a shaping
regularization ap-proach. Huang and Wang (2018) for random noise
attenuation generalized MMF into 2D in which SE is a matrix, not a vector.
Planar MMF has been more successful in random noise reduction since mor-
phological operators on a single trace do not have enough ability to de-tect
signal from random noise.
In this paper, we applied the adaptive curvelet transform and mor-
phological gradient (ACMG) algorithm to enhance data and detect channel
edges to the synthetic and real data sets containing channels. For this purpose,
we used the elliptical adaptive structuring element. We compared the results
of ACMG with the common edge detection fil-ters in image processing such
as Canny, Sobel, Laplacian of Gaussian (LoG), and similarity attribute.
2. Methodology
2.1. Curvelet transform
One of the multi-scale and multi-directional transforms which is proposed
to compensate shortcoming of the wavelet transform in two and higher
dimensions was curvelet transform (Candes and Donoho, 1999). It has high
directional and anisotropic properties due to the de-composition of the data
along with radial wedges in the 2D Fourier do-main. It is the second
generation curvelet transform which is introduced by Candes et al. (2006). To
digitize the curvelet transform, they pro-posed two algorithms, i.e., unequally-
spaced fast Fourier transform (USFFT), and wrapping. Because the latter is
easier and faster than the first one, we used wrapping-based fast discrete
curvelet transform in this study. The source code of the algorithm is available
in CurveLab package. For the detailed description of the theory and equations
of the fast discrete curvelet transform (FDCT) is referred to (Candes et al.,
2006).
2.2. Mathematical morphology
The mathematical morphology was first proposed by Matheron and Serra
around 1964 to investigate the geometric structures of geological samples
(Serra, 1982). It was introduced by Serra (1982) to image pro-cessing. The
language of mathematical morphology is set theory, since it uses the simple
mathematical concepts such as intersection and union of sets (Soille, 2004).
As a powerful tool, it is applicable in many image processing issues such as
texture analysis, edge detection and noise re-duction. Morphological
operators analyze the image structures based on their shape and do this with a
small template called structuring ele-ment. A 2D structuring element is a zero
matrix whose elements inside a given shape are 1. The shape of SE should be
selected according to the desired processing. The basic morphological
operator is “erosion” and “dilation” and all other operators are expressed in
terms of these two. Once probing the image by the structuring element, if
structuring ele-ment fits the image, the central pixel is a pixel of eroded
image, If the structuring element hits the image, the central pixel is a pixel of
dilated image and if the structuring element neither fits nor hits the image, the
central pixel does not belong to any eroded and dilated images. This op-
eration is shown schematically in Fig. 1. Indeed, dilation increases and
erosion decreases the border pixels. In other words, dilation gives the
maximum and erosion gives the minimum of an image intensity values in the
neighborhood of the SE. Two basic morphological filters are “opening”, i.e.,
erosion followed by dilation and “closing”, i.e., dilation followed by erosion.
In the grayscale image, opening removes the ob-jects which are brighter than
the background and smaller than the SE. On the contrary, closing removes the
objects which are darker than the background and smaller than the SE.
Sometimes the objects which are removed by the opening and closing are not
noises, so they can be recovered using “top-hat” and “bottom-hat” operators.
Top-hat is the difference between the original image and its opening and
bottom-hat is the difference between the closing and the original image. The
edges in the image are areas with high grey level variations. Gradient
operators can enhance these variations. Morphological gradients are operators
which can strengthen variations of pixel intensity in SE's neighborhood. The
simplest morphological gradient algorithms are de-fined in terms of the
difference between the results of the dilation, ero-sion and the original image.
Fig. 2 shows some aforementioned morphological operators on a simple
binary test image. The success of the mathematical morphology is due to its
simple mathematical de-scription and many powerful tools in image analysis
which it provides (Soille, 2004).
2.2.1. Adaptive mathematical morphology
Traditional mathematical morphology uses a fixed structuring ele-ment for
the whole image. This method is useful for detecting image features of a
certain size and shape. But selecting a proper structur-ing element for images
whose features varying in size and shape have difficulty. One solution is to
filter these images iteratively with SEs in different sizes, and finally, for each
point, use the result of an SE. But this method takes a lot of time because the
whole image should be processed many times; however, a small fraction of
calculation is required for the final result. Thus, the tendency to-wards
adaptive morphology has increased, which its origin is the theory introduced
by the Serra (1988). One method of defining adap-tive morphology is
structure-based, i.e., the structuring element aligned to edges and contours.
This can be done only using consider-ing the orientation, or the anisotropy
rate, or the distance to the edges. Relation to this approach, Landström and
Thurley (2013) in-troduced an elliptical adaptive structuring element based on
the gra-dient structure tensor (GST). The eigenvectors and eigenvalues of the
GST include information about the orientation of the image struc-tures
(edges) and the anisotropy rate (Landström and Thurley, 2013; Ćurić et al.,
2014).
 B. Boustani et al. / Journal of Applied Geophysics 172 (2020) 103881

Fig. 1. (a) Probing of a binary image using a 3˟3 square structuring element (shown in blue). The gray and white pixels of the image have 0 and 1 values, respectively. In structuring elements, pixels
inside of dash line are 0 and pixels inside of the solid line are 1. The square SE in pixel 1 fits the image, so this pixel is part of (b) eroded image. In pixel 2, the square SE hits the image, so this pixel is
part of (c) dilated image. In pixel 3, the square SE neither fits nor hits the image, so it does not belong to any eroded and dilated images. (d) Eroded image and (e) dilated image using a linear SE
(shown in red) with a length of 10 and angle of 30 degrees. (f), and (g) the opened (erosion followed by dilation) image using square SE and linear SE, respectively. As can be seen, the size and shape
of the structuring element have a crucial role in the filter output, and it should be selected according to the interested object. (For interpretation of the references to colour in this figure legend, the
reader is referred to the web version of this article.)

2.2.2. 2D gradient structure tensor
Gradient structure tensor is a well-known characteristic in image
processing which is constructed from the smoothed product of partial
derivatives of the image. Bakker et al. (1999) introduced an edge-preserving
and orientation adaptive filter using gradient structure ten-sor. In seismology,
gray-level value. 2D gradient structure tensor (GST), T(x,y), which rep-
resents the local directional structures in the image is defined by the fol-
lowing 2˟2 matrix (Landström and Thurley, 2013; Wang et al., 2017):
" #

Bakker (2002) also presented the edge sensitive at-tribute such as coherency
based on gradient structure tensor. If (x,y) is the coordinate of a pixel of the
image, and f(x,y) is corresponding
2
ð Þ¼ I IxIy ð Þ¼ σ ð ÞT ð Þ ðÞ
 I yI x I y2

Tx;y x;y G ∇f x; y ∇ f x; y ; 1
4 B. Boustani et al. / Journal of Applied Geophysics 172 (2020) 103881

where Ix and Iy demonstrate partial derivative of the image along the x-

T

∂∂
axis and y-axis, ∇ ¼ ∂x ∂y , and Gσ is a Gaussian kernel with stan-
dard deviation σ. This smoothing regularizes the matrix and is impor-tant to
obtain a stable estimation of feature orientations. Eigenvalue decomposition
of GST can estimate the orientation and anisotropy of image structures. So, in
the next step for each pixel (x,y), the eigen-values l 1(x,y) and l2(x,y) (l1 N l2),
and the corresponding eigenvectors e1(x,y) and e2(x,y) are calculated from the
symmetric matrix of GST. These eigenvalues contain information about the
image edges (Landström and Thurley, 2013):
Fig. 3. Ellipse parameters a, b and φ, and their relation to eigenvectors e 1 and e2 of GST
(Landström and Thurley, 2013).
l1 ≈ l2 N N 0: No dominant direction (edge crossing or point),
l1 N N l2 ≈ 0: Strong dominant direction (edge), The eigenvector e1 shows the dominant local gradient in the image, while
l1 ≈ l2 ≈ 0: No dominant direction (no edge).
the eigenvector e2, which is orthogonal to e 1, indicates the direc-tion of the
smallest variations.

Fig. 2. (a) A simple binary image and its (b) dilation, (c) erosion, (d) opening, (e) top-hat,
morphological gradient which has resulted from (f) dilated and original image subtraction, and
(g) original and eroded image subtraction. The square structuring element has a length of 5
pixels. The red lines show the original object that superimposed on the results. (For
interpretation of the references to colour in this figure legend, the reader is referred to the web
version of this article.) Fig. 4. The flowchart of the adaptive curvelet and morphological gradient algorithm.
 B. Boustani et al. / Journal of Applied Geophysics 172 (2020) 103881

2.2.3. Elliptical adaptive structuring element Table 1

Now, we can define a flat elliptical structuring element SE(a,b,φ) for each Input parameters of the ACMG algorithm for the synthetic and real data.

pixel (x,y), so that a and b are the semi-major axis and semi-minor axis of the Parameters Synthetic Real
ellipse and φ is the angle between the semi-major axis and x-axis. Fig. 3 Window size of the median filter 55 55
shows the ellipse parameters and their relation to the eigen-vectors of GST. ˟ ˟
Number of the curvelet scales 6 7
Hence, the ellipse parameters for each pixel are obtained from the following Number of the curvelet directions in the 2nd scale 16 16
equations (Landström and Thurley, 2013; Wang et al., 2017): σ1 (standard deviation of the Gaussian derivative kernel for 4 1
computing image gradient)
σ2 (standard deviation of the Gaussian filter for smoothing LST 3 3
components)
M (maximum allowable semi-major axis length of the ellipse) 8 8
l1ðx ; yÞ þ ε
a x; y :M;

ð Þ ¼ l1 ðx; yÞ þ l2ðx ; yÞ þ 2ε
l2ðx; yÞ þ ε
bx;y :M; 2 this study, we used a median filter before morphological gradient to smooth
Þ¼ the seismic image. Then, we extract the channel edges by the morphological
ð l1ðx ; yÞ þ l2ðx; yÞ þ 2ε ðÞ gradient, i.e., the difference between dilation and ero-sion, using EASE.
where M is the maximum allowable semi-major axis length which is de-fined Finally, the curvelet transform is used in post-processing to increase the
by the user. ε is a small value, i.e. machine epsilon. For the all values of the signal-to-noise ratio. Channels in time slices of the 3D seismic data are
l1(x,y) and l2(x,y) we have 0 ≤ b(x,y) ≤ a(x,y) ≤ M and a(x, considered as curvilinear structures with dif-ferent thicknesses and widths.
y) + b(x,y) = M. the orientation is obtained from the corresponding ei- Therefore, the multi-scale and multi-directional curvelet transform can be a
genvector (Landström and Thurley, 2013; Ćurić et al., 2014): good choice for separating them from noise. The curvelet coefficients which
e are parallel to the edges have magnitudes much greater than the zero. Hence,
2;x2 x;y we extract the maximum curvelet coefficients in all sub-bands using the
ð Þ
modified morphological top-hat algorithm (Miri and Mahloojifar, 2011). By
φ x; y tg−1
e
2;x1 x;y ; e2;x1 ðx ; yÞ≠0 ; 3 defi-nition, the top-hat operator results in local maxima of the data. In the
8 ð Þ 9
curvelet domain, we first calculated the absolute value of all curvelet sub-
bands. Then, a morphological close-open filter is applied, and the minimum of
ð Þ¼ π ðÞ
the filter result and original sub-band is calculated. To compute modified top-
> >

e
< 2;x1 x; y 0 =
hat, this minimum is subtracted from original sub-band for all curvelet sub-
> 2 ð Þ¼ >
bands. Finally, the inverse curvelet trans-form is applied and the channel edge
: ;
map is generated. Fig. 4 depicts the flowchart of the ACMG edge-detection
algorithm. In generating EASE, we used Gaussian first-order derivative of the
standard deviation
where e2, x1(x,y) and e2, x2(x,y) are the components of the eigenvector e 2 (x,
y). This structuring element changes dynamically from a line of length M,
near the dominant edges, to a circle of radius M/2, in isotropic regions in the
image.

2.3. Curvelet and morphological gradient

Gradient operators called edge-detectors because they enhance high-

frequency events of the image, which coincide with the edges. In
Fig. 5. (a) A test image on an assumed time slice and its closing by (b) disk structuring element, (c) multi-length and multi-direction linear structuring element, and (d) elliptical adaptive structuring
elements.
6 B. Boustani et al. / Journal of Applied Geophysics 172 (2020) 103881

Fig. 6. (a) A synthetic seismic time slice containing a channel with S/N of 1. (b) Presmoothing using a median filter. The edge detection using (c) morphological gradient, and (d) after applying
modified top-hat algorithm on all curvelet subbands, and (e) after applying modi fied top-hat algorithm on absolute value of all curvelet subbands, i.e., ACMG. As can be seen, using the absolute value
of curvelet subbands, the more appropriate edge detection results can be concluded. (f–h) The results of edge detection by employing the CMG, Sobel, and LoG filter, respectively.

σ1 to calculate the gradient of the image in vertical and horizontal direc-tions.
Then, we constructed the components of GST matrix according to Eq. (1). A
Gaussian filter of standard deviation σ2, the same as σ in Eq. (1), is used for
smoothing of the GST components. Then, the eigen-value decomposition is
applied to the GST. Finally, the ellipse parame-ters are calculated according
to the Eqs. (2) and (3). So, the only
parameters that should be defined by the user are σ1, σ2 and M (maxi-mum
allowable semi-major axis length). The step by step proposed method is as
follows:
a) Applying the median filter.
b) Generating EASE based on 2D gradient structure tensor.
 B. Boustani et al. / Journal of Applied Geophysics 172 (2020) 103881

Fig. 7. (a) A time slice of a 3D seismic data set containing channels. (b) The result of a median filter. The result of edge detection (c) using the morphological gradient with EASE and
(d) after applying curvelet transform. (e, f, and g) The edge detection by the CMG algorithm, the Sobel, and the LoG filter, respectively. (h) The similarity attribute of (a). The boxes in the upper left
of figures are missing data.

c) Applying the morphological gradient by the EASE. 3. Results and discussion

d) Applying wrapping based fast discrete curvelet transform.
e) Applying the modified top-hat algorithm using EASE to the absolute value To verify the quality of the EASE, in Fig. 5, the results of the closing on a
of all curvelet sub-bands. portion of the real data containing channels are presented. Fig. 5a is the
f) Applying the inverse fast discrete curvelet transform. original data containing the linear horizontal noise which is the
8 B. Boustani et al. / Journal of Applied Geophysics 172 (2020) 103881

Fig. 8. (a) Ground truth binary image of the synthetic data set of Fig. 6a which is attained using the manual picking of the data without random noise. (b, and c) Binarization and thinning of ACMG
and CMG edge detection, respectively. (d) Canny edge detection with threshold [0.06, 0.4], (e) Sobel edge detection with threshold 0.004, and (f) LoG edge detection with threshold 0.0005.

effect of the acquisition footprint. Figs. 5b, c, and d show the results of the
closing of 5a by disk SE, multi-length and multi-direction linear SE (used in
the proposed CMG algorithm), and EASE, respectively. As can be seen, all
three structuring elements have removed the noise, but the disk SE also
eliminates parts of the channels. The linear SE has not reconstructed the edges
of the channels as smoothly as the EASE.
be reduced, the edges will be destroyed. If the σ1 value is smaller than 1, then
the filter does not respond well. The values between 4 and 6 are proper for σ1.
Outside this range, if it is much smaller, the edges will not be well extracted
and if it is much larger, the edges will be destroyed. The values between 3 and
5 for σ2 can lead to an acceptable output. Again, a much smaller or larger
value of σ2 has the same results as σ1 in edge detection.

The proposed methodology is developed in the form of a MATLAB code

and evaluated on synthetic and real seismic time slices containing channels.
The parameters of the ACMG algorithm which is used for the synthetic and
real data are presented in Table 1. We determined the op-timum values for
these parameters by the trial and error. The median fil-ter with a 5*5 window
size usually gives the best result. The default value is considered for the
number of scales and directions of curvelet transform because of the
negligible effect they have on the filter output. The desired output resulted
from the M (maximum allowable semi-major axis length of the ellipse) value
between 6 and 10, which 8 is con-sidered appropriate in this study. Outside
this range, if a much smaller value is selected for M, the edges will not be
extracted, and the noise is stronger. If a much larger value is selected,
although more noise will
3.1. Synthetic data
The synthetic data from the convolution of a reflectivity cube with a
Ricker wavelet with the peak frequency 15 Hz with the sampling inter-val of
2 ms and spatial interval of 10 m. The earth model used in the con-struction
of the reflectivity cube consists of a horizontal and dip layering in which a
sinusoidal channel is embedded. Fig. 6a shows a time slice of this data set
with the signal-to-noise ratio (S/N) of 1. To the preprocessed data, we applied
a 2D median filter in a 5*5 window to smooth image before edge detection
(Fig. 6b). Figs. 6c and d show the edge detection results using adaptive
morphological gradient and after applying modified top-hat on all curvelet
subbands. The edge
 B. Boustani et al. / Journal of Applied Geophysics 172 (2020) 103881

Fig. 9. (a) Ground truth binary image of the real data set resulted from Fig. 7a using the manual picking for quantitative assessment. (b, and c) Binarization and thinning of ACMG, and CMG edge
detection, (d) Canny edge detection with threshold [0.04, 0.22], (e, and f) binarization and thinning of Sobel and LoG, respectively.

detection results by morphological gradient without curvelet transform is very have been able to detect the edges of the channels, while the noise level is
noisy. But after applying the curvelet filter, the channel edges could be more lower than that of the others.
appropriately extracted. Since the top-hat algorithm ex-tracts local maxima of
an image, using the absolute value of curvelet subbands in Figs. 6e and 6f 4. Quantitative assessment
affect the edge detection results compared with Fig. 6d. Then, as Figs. 6 g–h,
we used the edge detection algorithms (Sobel, and LoG) on it. All three We used four criteria to evaluate the proposed method quantita-tively.
ACMG, CMG and Sobel methods have well extracted the channel edges, They are the true positive rate (TPR), false positive rate (FPR), true negative
while the ACMG has a higher signal-to-noise ratio. rate (TNR) and accuracy (ACC):
TP

TPR ¼ TP þ FN ;
3.2. Real data
FP
The real data is a time slice of a 3D seismic volume of southern Iran (Fig.
7a). Fig. 7b depicts the result of preprocessing by the median filter with 5*5 FPR ¼ FP TN ; ð4Þ
windows. Fig. 7c shows the result of edge detection using the adaptive
þ
morphological gradient which is noisy. After applying curvelet transform in
TN
Fig. 7d, channel edges have separated from noise. Figs. 7e shows the result of
channel edge detection using CMG algorithm. It can be seen that the adaptive TNR ¼ TN þ FP ;
SE has been able to better extract the thin part of the channels. Compared to ðTP þ TNÞ
the Sobel, LoG, and similarity methods in Figs. 7f–h, it is concluded that the ACC ¼ ;
ACMG and CMG methods TP þ FP þ TN þ FN
where TP and TN indicate the correctly detected edge and background pixels,
respectively. FP illustrates background pixels, mistakenly
10 B. Boustani et al. / Journal of Applied Geophysics 172 (2020) 103881

Fig. 10. Comparison of the performance of ACMG, CMG, Canny, Sobel, and LoG. (a) For the synthetic data set of Fig. 6, and (b) for the real data set of Fig. 7. TPR and TNR demonstrate the rate of
edge and background pixels that are correctly detected. FPR specifies the proportion of pixels that are mistakenly detected as the edge, and the ACC determines the average of the edge and
background pixels that are correctly detected.

regarded as edge pixels. FN shows edge pixels, mistakenly recognized as
background pixels. To understand how well the proposed algorithm correctly
detects channel edges from the background, we converted the image to
binary. To do this, global thresholding via Otsu method and then
morphological thinning was used (Karbalaali et al., 2017a, 2017b, 2018).
Figs. 8 and 9 show the binary results of the synthetic and real data,
respectively. Figs. 8a and 9a are the ground truth binary edge images obtained
by the manual pick. Figs. 8b and 9b and Figs. 8c and 9c show the result of
binarization and thinning of ACMG and CMG edge detection algorithm,
respectively. Figs. 8d–f demonstrate the re-sults of Canny edge detection with
threshold [0.06, 0.4], Sobel edge de-tection with threshold 0.004, and LoG
edge detection with threshold 0.0005 for synthetic data. For Canny, Sobel,
and LoG, we used MATLAB edge detection function and chose the optimal
thresholds by trial and error. Figs. 9d–f show the result of the Canny edge
detection with threshold [0.04, 0.22], Sobel, and LoG for real data. Fig. 10
depicts the re-sults of the quantitative measurements between methods. For
the syn-thetic data, in ACMG and CMG, TPR is much more, FPR is less, and
TNR
and ACC is more than other methods. For the real data, in ACMG and CMG,
TPR is slightly more, FPR is less, and TNR and ACC is more than other
methods. TPR of all methods is low because our ground truth is not
sufficiently precise and used only to compare the methods. In gen-eral,
compared with other methods, the ACMG method has yielded ac-ceptable
results.
5. Conclusions
Mathematical morphology is a powerful tool in image processing which is
useful in many purposes such as extraction of the object's boundaries. The
curvelet transform, as a multi-scale and a multi-directional transformation due
to the directional properties and high anisotropic characteristics, can be
adapted to the curved discontinuities in an image. Hence, a combination of
the morphological filters and the curvelet transform can be used to detect
channel edges of seismic data. By applying the method to the synthetic and
real data it is con-cluded that the curvelet and morphological gradient
algorithm with
 B. Boustani et al. / Journal of Applied Geophysics 172 (2020) 103881
multi-directional linear structuring element can well extract the chan-nel
edges, but the adaptive curvelet and morphological gradient algo-rithm with
elliptical adaptive structuring element can better detect the thin part of the
channels. Besides, in the non-adaptive CMG algo-rithm, the entire operation
must be repeated with each structuring ele-ment, i.e., 60 times in this study.
The qualitative and quantitative comparisons show that the proposed method
can identify channel edges with a higher signal-to-noise ratio than the Canny,
Sobel, and LoG edge-detectors can.
Declaration of Competing Interest
The authors declare this paper and the data included whether in the form
presented or its base format present no conflicts of interest.
Acknowledgements
The authors gratefully thank the constructors of CurveLab for mak-ing the
code of the Fast Discrete Curvelet Transform (FDCT) available. The funder
of this paper is Amirkabir University of Technology.
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