Enhancing the detection of small coal structures by seismic diffraction imaging

2D line example of seismic diffraction imaging: (a) Original stack section; (b) Flattened traces; (c) Diffraction section extracted diffractions after application of a 25-trace averaging filter which backs out the horizontal events in (b); and (d) The original data (blue bordered) with the diffraction data (red bordered) within the corresponding zoom windows in (a) and (b), respectively. The details of the diffractions in the original and diffraction processed sections can be compared. In the diffraction section in the red rectangle of (d), two sets of diffractions can be identified. These are largely masked in the blue box of (d). The red line tracking across the section provides the location of the horizon picked for the diffraction analysis.465