Structural uncertainty visualization: ghost surfaces and animation of level sets.

@inproceedings{ViardGM2010,
 abstract = { Structural modeling is one of the very first steps of the reservoir modeling workflow. Hence, uncertainties occurring at this stage strongly impact the estimation of the reservoir hydrocarbon content. We propose two different visualization methods for a better understanding of these uncertainties: the ghost surfaces and the dynamic isosurface-based visualization. The ghost surfaces offer a static representation of uncertainty, by generating a 3D halo around faults or horizons, with the thickness and local density of the halo mapped to the positional uncertainty of the geological surface. Animated isosurfaces is a dynamic way of representing the uncertainty; it animates various possible geometries of the geological surfaces, so that positional uncertainty is mapped to the local time-frequency of the surface’s oscillations.
Both methods are well suited to depict geometrical uncertainties. However, they cannot directly represent topological uncertainty. To overcome this limitation, we propose an extension of the isosurface-based visualization method to also visualize fault networks with different topologies, using a binary tree to define the faults’ intersections. The intersection rules are applied directly on the graphics card (GPU) in order to allow for an interactive display while generating high-quality images. },
 author = { Viard, Thomas AND Cherpeau, Nicolas AND Caumon, Guillaume AND Levy, Bruno },
 booktitle = { Proc. 30th Gocad Meeting, Nancy },
 title = { Structural uncertainty visualization: ghost surfaces and animation of level sets. },
 year = { 2010 }
}