Estimating 4D differences in time-lapse using randomized sampling techniques

Repeatability in the seismic survey and processing has been cited as the main reason for which 4D seismic technology work. In the last decade, concerted efforts have been spent to make the 4D seismic process highly repeatable, without significant success. On the contrary, Compressed Sensing, which is also a relatively new sampling paradigm proposes that one can recover an estimate of a fully sampled signal from a noisy, under-sampled measurements provided the acquisition architecture satisfies some properties. By observing different under-sampled and random measurements from each vintage, corresponding to different acquisition geometries, we show that one can still detect the 4D change in time using recent ideas from Compressed sensing. Using a realistic synthetic model, we show two methods of estimating the 4D difference and compare their relative performance to each other.