An unsupervised method to extract 2D and 3D inner earth structures from sei
smic reflection measurements is described. The application is a typical tex
ture segmentation problem, which can be split up into a feature extraction
stage and a segmentation stage. As a texture feature, the locally emergent
frequency is estimated by a Gabor filter bank. The instantaneous frequency
(IF) has already been successfully used for seismic trace analysis(21) and
will be compared with the results of the filter bank. The second stage of t
he algorithm involves a region-growing method to compute the final object s
tructure. The extremely flexible segmentation scheme is appropriate for app
lication to 2D and 3D images of arbitrary vectorial dimension. The merging
decision is based on the mutual inlier ratio of two adjacent regions. This
ratio is computed by robust regression techniques(19) to avoid noise artifa
cts. A mutual inlier ratio discrimination function to recognize identical G
aussian distributions, guaranteeing a 97.5% certainty, is derived. This met
hod is compared with the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test and results of the applica
tion in a segmentation algorithm are shown. The segmentation stage is also
tested with different benchmark data sets from other computer vision proble
ms to demonstrate its general flexibility.