Treatment of conflicting dips in the 3D common-reflection-surface stack

The 3D common-reflection-surface stack is a tool to simulate zero-offset sections from the prestack data. In conventional implementations conflicting dip situations, i.e., the contribution of more than one stacking operator per output location, are not taken into account. This leads to stacked sections with fragmentary events and to incomplete sets of stacking parameters. Subsequent applications based on the results of the common-reflection-surface stack and its attributes will show deteriorated quality.
In this paper, I present a modified workflow for the handling of the conflicting dip problem in context of the 3D common-reflection-surface stack. The strategy utilizes the path-summation technique to obtain an improved input for the conflicting dip search in the zero-offset domain. The actual detection is done by means of an adapted peak detection algorithm. For each detected event consistent sets of attributes are obtained by a newly introduced search step.
Two 3D real data applications show the applicability of the proposed technique. The strategy proves to resolve most of the conflicting dip situations even for poor signal-to-noise ratio. With only moderate additional computational cost the presented method provides superior results compared to the conventional 3D common-reflection-surface stack.