Enabling large-scale seismic data acquisition, processing and waveform-inversion via rank-minimization

In this thesis, I adapt ideas from the field of compressed sensing to mitigate the computational and memory bottleneck of seismic processing workflows such as missing-trace interpolation, source separation and wave-equation based inversion for large-scale 3- and 5-D seismic data. For interpolation and source separation using rank-minimization, I propose three main ingredients, namely a rank-revealing transform domain, a subsampling scheme that increases the rank in the transform domain, and a practical large-scale data-consistent rank-minimization framework, which avoids the need for expensive computation of singular value decompositions. We also devise a wave-equation based factorization approach that removes computational bottlenecks and provides access to the kinematics and amplitudes of full-subsurface offset extended images via actions of full extended image volumes on probing vectors, which I use to perform the amplitude-versus- angle analyses and automatic wave-equation migration velocity analyses on complex geological environments. After a brief overview of matrix completion techniques in Chapter 1, we propose a singular value decomposition (SVD)-free factorization based rank-minimization approach for large-scale matrix completion problems. Then, I extend this framework to deal with large-scale seismic data interpolation problems, where I show that the standard approach of partitioning the seismic data into windows is not required, which use the fact that events tend to become linear in these windows, while exploiting the low-rank structure of seismic data. Carefully selected synthetic and realistic seismic data examples validate the efficacy of the interpolation framework. Next, I extend the SVD-free rank-minimization approach to remove the seismic cross-talk in simultaneous source acquisition. Experimental results verify that source separation using the SVD-free rank-minimization approaches are comparable to the sparsity-promotion based techniques; however, separation via rank-minimization is significantly faster and memory efficient. We further introduce a matrix-vector formulation to form full-subsurface extended image volumes, which removes the storage and computational bottleneck found in the convention methods. I demonstrate that the proposed matrix-vector formulation is used to form different image gathers with which amplitude-versus-angle and wave-equation migration velocity analyses is performed, without requiring prior information on the geologic dips. Finally, I conclude the thesis by outlining potential future research directions and extensions of the thesis work.