Perception of Visual Information: What are you Interpreting from your seismic?

Human colour perception exhibits a number of phenomena that are non-linear and often unexpected. Yet these effects influence everything that we see and interpret from our seismic datasets. In today’s interpretation workflows, colour is more extensively used in data visualisation of multiple seismic attributes to provide intuitive and rich information displays. As we increasingly rely on such visualisation, it is increasingly important to understand how and where the effects of the human visual system are influencing what we see and how we interpret it. This paper presents some of the most significant perceptual effects that affect seismic interpretation. All of the effects discussed are influenced by how the subject data is coloured but affect perception in different varied ways, for example apparent addition of false structure within data and changes in the apparent depth of objects in a 3D display. We show examples which are relevant to visualisation methods used on a daily basis in seismic interpretation. Through understanding these effects, the interpreter can begin to recognise where they are influenced by them and begin to understand how and where to question the reliability of what they are interpreting.