Highland Geology has licensed the Kingdom Suite, with which it has three years' experience

    - and it has developed and uses two proprietary programs for interpretation

We are maintained licensees of SMT's Kingdom Suite 2d/3dPAK and VuPAK software, and have acquired substantial experience using Kingdom programs during the past 2-3 years.

As regards our own software, Highland Geology won a SMART:SCOTLAND award in August 2002 for the development of TraceInterpreter. The object of the 9-month project was to develop a utility to assist in interpretation of complex seismic images. The software is designed for the accurate tracing of horizons in seismic profiles and air photographs, using sophisticated sampling methods to reduce noise in the image whilst subtle, important pieces of data are validated and retained. It overlays the line traces on the image, then generates and classifies the line intersections according to given geological rules, allowing it to identify discordant lines. Then it displays the interpretation with the important geological boundaries in the image now detected and highlighted for the user to work with, using a capable graphics editor interlaced with the database. The user has full control over the tracing and edit work, via an interface which is simple, intuitive and requires no knowledge at all of image processing techniques. Slider bars are provided for varying each function, with the results demonstrated in a working window. The user can edit and complete the interpretation manually, linking, deleting and adding new lines, and can save the model in a variety of formats.

TraceInterpreter is a very interesting utility, optimised for interpretation work. We have plans to develop it further in the areas of  textural analysis for fault recognition, and automatic depth conversion. In the meantime its a powerful capability which has proved helpful in complex seismic interpretation, in fact we credit it with finding a new sedimentary basin!. 

DepthCon2000 is a simple, fast, efficient way to depth convert a seismic bitmap image. The user can specify a single function or can sketch a colour-polygon interpretation on the image, attach interval velocity values to each polygon, and see the seismic image depth-converted accordingly. DepthCon also has some simple section balance capability: it can run line-length checks between pins and it can perform restorations of the seismic image on drawn fault surfaces, using simple shear (inclined and vertical shear). It has proved to be very successful for quicklook evaluation of complex or strongly time-distorted seismic sections, and we continue to use it.

As a stand-alone, specialist program DepthCon2000 has always been of limited interest to workstation users and was eventually withdrawn from the RockWare catalogue, last year: but if you are interested in trialling it you are most welcome to contact us.