Dual-sensor wavefield separation in a compressed domain using parabolic dictionary learning

Abstract

Abstract In the marine seismic industry, the size of the recorded and processed seismic data is continuously increasing and tends to become very large. Hence, applying compression algorithms specifically designed for seismic data at an early stage of the seismic processing sequence helps to save cost on storage and data transfer. Dictionary learning methods have been shown to provide state‐of‐the‐art results for seismic data compression. These methods capture similar events from the seismic data and store them in a dictionary of atoms that can be used to represent the data in a sparse manner. However, as with conventional compression algorithms, these methods still require the data to be decompressed before a processing or imaging step is carried out. Parabolic dictionary learning is a dictionary learning method where the learned atoms follow a parabolic travel time move out and are characterized by kinematic parameters such as the slope and the curvature. In this paper, we present a novel method where such kinematic parameters are used to allow the dual‐sensor (or two‐components) wavefield separation processing step directly in the dictionary learning compressed domain for 2D seismic data. Based on a synthetic seismic data set, we demonstrate that our method achieves similar results as an industry‐standard FK‐based method for wavefield separation, with the advantage of being robust to spatial aliasing without the need for data preconditioning such as interpolation and reaching a compression rate around 13. Using a field data set of marine seismic acquisition, we observe insignificant differences on a 2D stacked seismic section between the two methods, whereas reaching a compression ratio higher than 15 when our method is used. Such a method could allow full bandwidth data transfer from vessels to onshore processing centres, where the compressed data could be used to reconstruct not only the recorded data sets, but also the up‐ and down‐going parts of the wavefield.