Traditional seismic data interpretation focuses on changes of amplitude and phase. However, amplitude in most cases cannot reflect the actual geologic situation. Seismic interface can be either a lithologic interface or a lithologic transitional zone. The reflection of lithologic transitional zone is the fractional order derivative of incident wavelet. So the fractional order derivative is introduced into the calculation of seismic attribute to establish a new attribute called singularity which is sensitive to waveform but insensitive to amplitude. The singularity can be used to describe the lateral changes of seismic reflection interface. The principles of this method are as follows: firstly, fractional derivatives of various orders are calculated from a given seismic wavelet; then, matching pursuit algorithm is used to decompose seismic data into different orders of fractional derivatives of wavelet and then to obtain the fractional order of reflection events. This method was applied to preprocess the 2-D seismic data of Shengli oilfield, showing that the fractional order derivative profile can effectively describe the unconformity and reflect the lateral changes of actual interface.