pysegy

pysegy is a minimal Python library for working with SEGY Rev 1 data. The project provides helpers to read and write files as well as utilities to scan large surveys without loading every trace in memory.

Capabilities

• Read complete SEGY files with segy_read and access both binary and trace headers.
• Write new data sets using segy_write from NumPy arrays.
• Lazily inspect large archives via segy_scan and the SegyScan object.
• Retrieve individual header fields with automatic scaling through get_header.
• Compatible with any fsspec filesystem for local or remote storage.

Installation

Install the project in editable mode from the repository root:

python -m pip install -e .

Or to install the latest pypi release

pip install pysegy

Testing

Run the unit tests with pytest:

pytest -vs

The tests run automatically on GitHub Actions with coverage reports uploaded to Codecov.

Scan benchmark

The scan benchmark compares sequential and threaded scanning of a file or directory:

python benchmarks/scan_benchmark.py /path/to/large.segy
python benchmarks/scan_benchmark.py /path/to/survey --pattern '*.segy'

Without an argument the bundled data directory is scanned. Threading pays off once several files or many shots are involved; a single small file is dominated by the fixed cost of opening it.

Inspiration

This project started as a lightweight port of the Julia package SegyIO.jl. The goal is to provide a similar user experience for Python while keeping the code base small and easy to understand.