Robust Estimation of Primaries by Sparse Inversion via one-norm minimization

This package is an application for simultaneous multiple removal and estimation of the source signature. It is based on the Estimation of Primaries by Sparse Inversion approach but reformulated via block- coordinate descent and convexification to L1 minimization. We believe this is therefore more robust to artifacts, and should converge quicker and more reliably that the original formulation.

This package is available only in the software release for members of SINBAD consortium.

Tim Tai-Yi Lin (tlin@eos.ubc.ca), April 30th 2013

Contents

How is the package organized?

Robust EPSI is divided into two parts in this release.

The program itself (implemented in pure MATLAB) is contained in {$SLIM_ROOT}/tools/algorithms/REPSI/. However, its main driver file (EPSI_SLIM_main.m) is designed for experimentation, and requires a large myriad of options to be set. Even though only a few of the options are required, I nevertheless consider it too complicated to directly invoke as a utility.

Therefore, interaction with the Robust EPSI program should be done through the helper scripts in {$SLIM_ROOT}/applications/WavefieldSeparation/RobustEPSI/. Each subdirectory contained therein (except for data and doc) contain the helper scripts to necessary to process a specific dataset. See the file README_examples.txt for documentation on all the example datasets contained in this software release.

Getting up and running

A basic walkthrough can be found here.

Do I need the MATLAB Parallel Computation Toolbox?

No. Robust EPSI is explicitly designed to work without the MATLAB Parallel Computation Toolbox. If your machine has enough memory to process the prestack data, it is perfectly fine to simply execute without parallel mode (setting parallel = 0). The total memory requirement is currently about 25x the stored single-precision filesize of SU data, or 80x if using the Curvelet-Wavelet-based transform domain.

Parallel execution mode for RobustEPSI mostly takes advantage of the shared-memory mode, and is meant to overcome the single-machine memory limit. If you lack the license necessary for distributed execution of parallel code, I recommend turning off parallel mode entirely to avoid the execution overhead associated with using distributed arrays. Because the Robust EPSI code is painstakingly vectorized, in most cases invoking parallel execution mode actually results in a slowdown for single-machine execution.

More information

See the included README.txt and README_example.txt for a more detailed description of the program.

References

[1]. Tim T.Y. Lin and Felix J. Herrmann, [2013] Robust estimation of primaries by sparse inversion via one-norm minimization: Geophysics, 78, no. 3, R133-R150