section the bank of optical filters is designed in the frequency domain and the seismic section is transformed to the frequency domain with a 2d fourier transform as shown in fig3 the standard bank of optical filters has different scales of filters oriented in different directions different scales accommodate different frequencies of seismic data the dominant direction in the image is found by 1 summing the convolution energy at different scales frequencies so that different frequencies are taken into account and 2 selecting the direction that shows the greatest average convolution energy for further calculations the present invention differs from the field of vision science by modifying the log gabor filter instead of having filters at different scales a step function in the radial direction is used this is done because averaging many filters with different scales converges to a step function only the angular component of the log gabor filters is needed since filters at different scales are not used the number of filters in the bank is reduced by the factor of the number of scales even with the reduced size of the filter bank calculation of the ovf requires a significant amount of time for this reason in accordance with the preferred embodiment of the present invention the computation is performed in a separate step independent of horizon picking it is then available for picking any horizon on its associated seismic data the initial time to create the ovf is small compared with the time required to pick the hundreds of horizons that are typically required in an interpretation project there is no.