First-arrival picking through pattern matching and threshold adjustment

Abstract

First-arrival picking is a crucial and fundamental task in seismic data processing. Existing direct picking methods are often sensitive to background noise and complex near-surface conditions. In this paper, we propose a first-arrival picking through pattern matching and threshold adjustment (FPMA) method, which comprises two subroutines. The range detection subroutine obtains a first-arrival range with adaptive pattern selection and pattern matching techniques. The former selects an appropriate pattern, while the latter obtains the first-arrival range. The first-arrival detection subroutine determines first arrivals in the range with the threshold adjustment technique, which automatically selects an appropriate threshold for picking. Experiments on five datasets demonstrated that FPMA is more accurate and efficient than four popular methods.