Simply denoise: wavefield reconstruction via jittered undersampling

In this paper, we present a new discrete undersampling scheme designed to favor wavefield reconstruction by sparsity-promoting inversion with transform elements that are localized in the Fourier domain. Our work is motivated by empirical observations in the seismic community, corroborated by recent results from compressive sampling, which indicate favorable (wavefield) reconstructions from random as opposed to regular undersampling. As predicted by theory, random undersampling renders coherent aliases into harmless incoherent random noise, effectively turning the interpolation problem into a much simpler denoising problem. A practical requirement of wavefield reconstruction with localized sparsifying transforms is the control on the maximum gap size. Unfortunately, random undersampling does not provide such a control and the main purpose of this paper is to introduce a sampling scheme, coined jittered undersampling, that shares the benefits of random sampling, while offering control on the maximum gap size. Our contribution of jittered sub-Nyquist sampling proves to be key in the formulation of a versatile wavefield sparsity-promoting recovery scheme that follows the principles of compressive sampling. After studying the behavior of the jittered undersampling scheme in the Fourier domain, its performance is studied for curvelet recovery by sparsity-promoting inversion (CRSI). Our findings on synthetic and real seismic data indicate an improvement of several decibels over recovery from regularly-undersampled data for the same amount of data collected.