Compressive sensing in seismic exploration: an outlook on a new paradigm

Many seismic exploration techniques rely on the collection of massive data volumes that are subsequently mined for information during processing. While this approach has been extremely successful in the past, current efforts toward higher resolution images in increasingly complicated regions of the Earth continue to reveal fundamental shortcomings in our workflows. Chiefly amongst these is the so-called "curse of dimensionality" exemplified by Nyquist's sampling criterion, which disproportionately strains current acquisition and processing systems as the size and desired resolution of our survey areas continues to increase. We offer an alternative sampling method leveraging recent insights from compressive sensing towards seismic acquisition and processing for data that, from a traditional point of view, are considered to be undersampled. The main outcome of this approach is a new technology where acquisition and processing related costs are decoupled the stringent Nyquist sampling criterion. At the heart of our approach lies randomized incoherent sampling that breaks subsampling-related interferences by turning them into harmless noise, which we subsequently remove by promoting sparsity in a transform-domain. Acquisition schemes designed to fit into this regime no longer grow significantly in cost with increasing resolution and dimensionality of the survey area, but instead its cost ideally only depends on transform-domain sparsity of the expected data. Our contribution is split into two part.