Advanced Volume Visualization Techniques for Seismic Interpretation

In the past ten years, volume rendering tools have been progressively adopted by the geophysical community. The emergence of high-end graphics workstations with 3D texture capabilities made real-time volume rendering possible. Many interactive volume rendering packages are now available for seismic interpretation. However, interpretation is still mostly done in 2D. This is mainly due to the high spatial frequencies of seismic data that make it very difficult to produce meaningful volume images. Classical volume rendering often results in cluttered useless images. We adapt high quality volume rendering algorithms from the computer graphics community. These algorithms are more suitable for seismic data analysis than the classical ones. They use the capabilities of the recent programmable graphics hardware. Moreover, we present a versatile multimodal volume rendering system that enables the efficient co-visualization of several volumes.