Abstract Local seismic attributes measure seismic signal characteristics not instantaneously, at each signal point, and not globally, across a data window, but locally in the neighborhood of each point. I define local attributes with the help of regularized inversion and demonstrate their usefulness for measuring local frequencies of seismic signals and local similarity between different data sets. I use shaping regularization for controlling the locality and smoothness of local attributes. A multicomponent-image-registration example from a nine-component land survey illustrates practical applications of local attributes for measuring differences between registered images.