Compressive imaging by wavefield inversion with group sparsity

Migration relies on multi-dimensional correlations between source- and residual wavefields. These multi-dimensional correlations are computationally expensive because they involve operations with explicit and full matrices that contain both wavefields. By leveraging recent insights from compressive sampling, we present an alternative method where linear correlation-based imaging is replaced by imaging via multidimensional deconvolutions of compressibly sampled wavefields. Even though this approach goes at the expense of having to solve a sparsity-promotion recovery program for the image, our wavefield inversion approach has the advantage of reducing the system size in accordance to transform-domain sparsity of the image. Because seismic images also exhibit a focusing of the energy towards zero offset, the compressive-wavefield inversion itself is carried out using a recent extension of one-norm solver technology towards matrix-valued problems. These so-called hybrid $(1,\,2)$-norm solvers allow us to penalize pre-stack energy away from zero offset while exploiting joint sparsity amongst near-offset images. Contrary to earlier work to reduce modeling and imaging costs through random phase-encoded sources, our method compressively samples wavefields in model space. This approach has several advantages amongst which improved system-size reduction, and more flexibility during subsequent inversions for subsurface properties.