As advertised in a previous post we aim to review and compare freely available tools for seismic quality control. The standard bearer is most definitely SeiSee from DMNG . It seems to have been around for ever, but as of May 2021, version 22.6 dated 2017 appears to be the latest available (older versions are available on other links). More on SeiSee can be found here and on the original DMNG download site together with other codes such as SegDSee which is a similar viewer but for SEG-D format files. Also available and dated March 2021 is SeiSeeMp which is a slightly simplified tool but available multi-platform (including Linux) and for which source code is available.
I can understand that some of these download sites may not appear too friendly for those of you with highly security minded IT departments and those without administrator privilege’s. If you have these difficulties and would still like to use SeiSee then we recommend that you use your own laptop or you can contact us and we can come up with a cloud based solution which will suit your needs. Although free, SeiSee is a very useful piece of software and its well worth suffering the paperwork with your IT staff to get it installed. As far as we know the install exe is free of any virus or bugs and works out of the box on any windows system.
The above screenshot shows a typical SeiSee QC session featuring files in a given directory (left tab), middle tab (trace, EBCDIC or binary header) and seismic display with frequency spectrum. The software is fairly easy to use. If you have any difficulties then feel free to ask me via the comments to this post and I will try and help. Some comments and tips:
- The seismic display is probably not the very best, but I find it very quick and perfectly good enough for simple data diagnostics. If I need to make figures as part of the QC then I would normally use Seismic Unix for this. SeiSee is great for a few screen snapshots for example by PrtScr or Windows key-Shift-S sequence.
- The display is practically instantaneous and you can look at any SEGY file including stacks, shots or velocity cubes.
- Seismic data processing is limited to bandpass filtering, AGC scaling and wiggle/variable area displays. There is an inversion option but that is not acoustic impendence inversion, it just reverses the display polarity.
- You can read and edit 3D volumes in SeiSee also – for example to extract a given inline or crossline (although its a bit slow for this compared to something like Petrel or OpenDtect).
- Trace headers can be edited and exported, although normally I would do this in Seismic Unix.
- One feature I like is that you can simultaneously QC many SEGY files in the same directory. I find this useful, for example, to check all the binary or trace headers of many files together just by flicking back and forwards. I have sometimes managed to crash SeiSee doing this, but it is quick to get back in and carry on where you left off.
In our next post we will make some comparisons with other available software for QC, such as the newly released SeisTopia and Geo2View. In our view SeiSee is an indispensable windows based tool for quality control of seismic data, particularly trace headers.