Wigner-Ville distribution and its application in seismic attenuation estimation

The attenuation of seismic signals is often characterized in the frequency domain using statistical measures of the power spectrum. However, the conventional Fourier transform-based power spectrum estimation methods suffer from time-frequency resolution problems. Wigner-Ville distribution, which is a member of Cohen class time-frequency distributions, possesses many appealing properties, such as time-frequency marginal distribution, time-frequency localization, etc. Therefore, Wigner-Ville distribution offers a new way for estimating the attenuation of seismic signals. This paper initially gives a brief introduction to Wigner-Ville distribution and the smoothed Wigner-Ville distribution that is effective in reducing the cross-term effect, and then presents a method for seismic attenuation estimation based on the instantaneous energy spectrum of the Wigner-Ville distribution. A real data example from central Tarim Basin in western China is presented to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The results show that the Wigner-Ville distribution-based seismic attenuation estimation method can effectively detect the difference between reef, shoal and lagoon facies by their attenuation properties, indicating that the estimated seismic attenuation can be used for reef and shoal carbonate reservoir characterization.