NSERC 2013 DNOISE progress report

As we enter the second half of the DNOISE II project, we are happy to report that we have made significant progress on several fronts. Firstly, our work on seismic data acquisition with compressive sensing is becoming widely recognized, reflected in adaptations of this technology by industry and in this year’s SEG Karcher award, which went to Gilles Hennenfent, who was one of the researchers who started working in this area in our group. As this report shows, we continued to make progress on this topic with numerous presentations, publications, and software releases. Secondly, our work on large-scale optimization is also widely adapted and instrumental to the different research areas on the grant. In particular, we are excited about new directions that go beyond sparsity promotion and which allow us to exploit other types of structure within the data, such as low-rank. Over the near future, we expect to see a body of new research based on these findings touching acquisition as well as the wave-equation based inversion aspects of our research program. Thirdly, we are also very happy to report that we continued to make substantial progress in wave-equation base inversion. In particular, we would like to mention successes in the areas of acceleration of sparsity-promoting imaging with source estimation and multiples and in theoretical as well as practical aspects of full-waveform inversion. We derived a highly practical and economic formulation of 3-D FWI and we also came up with a complete new formulation of FWI, which mitigates issues related to cycle skipping. Finally, we made a lot of progress applying our algorithm to industrial datasets, which has been well received by industry. Our findings show that FWI is still an immature technology calling for more theoretical input and for the development of practical workflows. Over the last year our work cumulated in 14 peer-reviewed journal publications, 5 submitted journal publications, 13 (+ 9) extended abstracts, 32 talks at international conferences, and 6 software packages. Finally, we are happy to report that we have been joined by several new companies, namely, ION Geophysical, CGG, and Woodside. At this midpoint of the Grant, we are also happy to report that we are well on schedule to meet the milestones included in the original proposal. Given our wide range of expertise and our plans to replace our compute cluster, we continue to be in an excellent position to make fundamental contributions to the fields of seismic data acquisition, processing, and wave-equation based inversion.