Estimation of surface-free data by curvelet-domain matched filtering and sparse inversion

Matching seismic wavefields and images lies at the heart of many pre-post-processing steps part of seismic imaging- whether one is matching predicted wavefield components, such as multiples, to the actual to-be-separated wavefield components present in the data or whether one is aiming to restore migration amplitudes by scaling, using an image-to-remigrated- image matching procedure to calculate the scaling coefficients. The success of these wavefield matching procedures depends on our ability to (i) control possible overfitting, which may lead to accidental removal of energy or to inaccurate image-amplitude corrections, (ii) handle data or images with nonunique dips, and (iii) apply subsequent wavefield separations or migraton amplitude corrections stably. In this paper, we show that the curvelet transform allows us to address all these issues by im- posing smoothness in phase space, by using their capability to handle conflicting dips, and by leveraging their ability to represent seismic data and images sparsely. This latter property renders curvelet-domain sparsity promotion an effective prior.