NSERC 2014 DNOISE progress report

As we entered 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. For instance, ConocoPhilips ran a highly successful field trial on Marine acquisition with compressive sensing and obtained significant improvements compared to standard production (see figure below). Moreover, one of the main outcomes of this year’s EAGE workshop was that industry is ready to adapt randomized sampling as a new acquisition paradigm. Needless to say this is a big success for what we have been trying to accomplish with DNOISE II. Finally, we have made a breakthrough in the application of randomized sampling in 4-D seismic, which is receiving a lot of interest from industry. Secondly, our work on large-scale optimization in the context of wave-equation based inversion is also increasingly widely adapted. For instance, our batching techniques are making the difference between making a loss or profit for a large contractor company active in the area of full-waveform inversion. We also continued to make progress in exciting new directions that go beyond sparsity promotion and which allow us to exploit other types of structure within the data, such as low-rank for matrices or hierarchical Tucker formats for tensors. Application of these techniques show excellent results and in certain cases, such as source separation problems with small dithering, show significant improvements over transform-domain methods. Thirdly, we continued to make significant progress in wave-equation based inversion. We extended our new penalty-based formulation now called Wavefield Reconstruction Inversion/Imaging to include total-variation regularization and density variations. We also continued to make progress on multiples, imaging with multiples and 3-D full-waveform inversion. Statoil is the latest company to join and we have several other companies that have shown a keen interest. We also received substantial in-kind contributions including a license to WesternGeco’s iOmega and HPC equipment discounts. After many years of support BP decided unfortunately to no longer support SINBAD quoting financial headwind related to the Deep horizon disaster. On a more positive note, we are extremely happy to report major progress on our efforts to secure access to high-performance compute, including renewed funding from NSERC and our involvement in the International Inversion Initiative in Brazil. 9 peer-reviewed journal publications have resulted from our work within the reporting period, with a further 6 submitted, and DNOISE members disseminated the results of our research at 49 major national and international conference presentations. On the HQP training side, 4 MSc students have recently graduated, with one obtaining a position with CGG Calgary, and we added 4 postdocs and 3 PhD students to our team in September 2014, greatly increasing our research capacity. As can be seen from the report below, we are well on schedule and on certain topics well beyond the milestones included in the original proposal. With the purchase of the new cluster we expect to see a surge of activity in extending our algorithms to 3D. With this increased capacity, 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. In the sections below, we give a detailed overview of the research and publication activities of the different members of the group and how these relate to the objectives of the grant, to industrial uptake, and to outreach. Unless stated otherwise the students and PDFs are (co)-supervised by the PI. We refer to the publications section 4.0 for a complete list of our presentations, conference proceedings, and journal publications. We also refer to our mindmap, which clearly establishes connections between the different research topics we have embarked upon as part of the DNOISE II project.