Matrix completion on unstructured grids : 2-D seismic data regularization and interpolation

Seismic data interpolation via rank-minimization techniques has been recently introduced in the seismic community. All the existing rank-minimization techniques assume the recording locations to be on a regular grid, e.g. sampled periodically, but seismic data are typically irregularly sampled along spatial axes. Other than the irregularity of the sampled grid, we often have missing data. In this paper, we study the effect of grid irregularity to conduct matrix completion on a regular grid for unstructured data. We propose an improvement of existing rank-minimization techniques to do regularization. We also demonstrate that we can perform seismic data regularization and interpolation simultaneously. We illustrate the advantages of the modification using a real seismic line from the Gulf of Suez to obtain high quality results for regularization and interpolation, a key application in exploration geophysics.