The SEG-Y file format is one standard developed by the Society of Exploration Geophysicists (http://www.seg.org) for storing geophysical data. It is an open standard, and is controlled by the SEG Technical Standards Committee. The most recent revision of the SEG Y format was published in 2002, named the rev 1 specification, and can be downloaded in the following link.

http://www.seg.org/documents/10161/77915/seg_y_rev1.pdf

The next figure shows the byte stream structure of a SEGY file. The format consists of a textual file header (3200 bytes), a binary file header (400 bytes), N extended textual file header records and M seismic traces records.

For this project we have designed an image reader compatible with VTK, derived from the class vtkImageReader. The Visualization ToolKit (VTK) is an open source, freely available software system for 3D computer graphics, image processing, and visualization used by thousands of researchers and developers around the world (www.vtk.org). Our reader named vtkSegyImageReader produces as output an object of type vtkImageData (both 2D and 3D) that can be visualized using several mappers of VTK. The upper figure shows two cuts (inline and crossline) of the seismic cube produced at the output of this reader.