Adaptive curvelet-domain primary-multiple separation

In many exploration areas, successful separation of primaries and multiples greatly determines the quality of seismic imaging. Despite major advances made by Surface-Related Multiple Elimination (SRME), amplitude errors in the predicted multiples remain a problem. When these errors vary for each type of multiple differently (as a function of offset, time and dip), these amplitude errors pose a serious challenge for conventional least-squares matching and for the recently introduced separation by curvelet-domain thresholding. We propose a data-adaptive method that corrects amplitude errors, which vary smoothly as a function of location, scale (frequency band) and angle. In that case, the amplitudes can be corrected by an element-wise curvelet-domain scaling of the predicted multiples. We show that this scaling leads to a successful estimation of the primaries, despite amplitude, sign, timing and phase errors in the predicted multiples. Our results on synthetic and real data show distinct improvements over conventional least-squares matching, in terms of better suppression of multiple energy and high-frequency clutter and better recovery of the estimated primaries.