Applications of low-rank compressed seismic data to full waveform inversion and extended image volumes

Conventional oil and gas fields are increasingly difficult to explore and image, resulting in the call for more complex wave-equation based inversion algorithms that require dense long-offset samplings. Consequently, there is an exponential growth in the size of data volumes and prohibitive demands on computational resources. In this work, we propose a method to compress and process seismic data directly in a low-rank tensor format, which drastically reduces the amount of storage required to represent the data. We first outline how seismic data exhibits low-rank structure in a particular transform-domain, which can be exploited to compress the dense data in one extremely storage-efficient tensor format when the data is fully sampled. In the more realistic case of missing data, we can use efficient interpolation techniques to approximate the fully sampled volume in compressed form. In either case, once we have our data represented in its compressed tensor form, we design an algorithm to extract source or receiver gathers directly from the compressed parameters. This extraction process can be done on-the-fly directly on the compressed data, in a full waveform inversion context, and does not require scanning through the entire dataset in order to form shot gathers. To the best of our knowledge, this work is one of the first major contributions to working with seismic data applications directly in the compressed domain without reconstructing the entire data volume. We use a stochastic inversion approach, which works with small subsets of source experiments at each iteration, further reducing the computational and memory costs of full waveform inversion. We also demonstrate how this data compression and extraction technique can be applied to forming full subsurface image gathers through probing techniques.