Time-frequency analysis of seismic reflection signals

We show the implementation of bilinear time-frequency representations in the interpretation of seismic data. In seismic stratigraphy the reflection patterns in seismic data are interpreted in terms of subsurface stratification and lithological properties. The time-frequency representation clearly elicits seismic reflection patterns and can thus provide useful information on subsurface stratification. A comparison of several t-f representations shows that the best results, from an interpretational point of view, can be obtained with a kernel that is adapted to the characteristics of the signal to be analyzed. We demonstrate that considerable improvement upon an existing method for seismic data analysis, complex-trace attribute analysis, can be achieved. The local frequency that is extracted from the t-f representation provides a better picture of the spectral variation in the data than the instantaneous frequency, that was derived from the analytic signal