Simultaneous-source seismic data acquisition and processing with compressive sensing

The work in this thesis adapts ideas from the field of compressive sensing (CS) that lead to new insights into acquiring and processing seismic data, where we can fundamentally rethink how we design seismic acquisition surveys and process acquired data to minimize acquisition- and processing-related costs. Current efforts towards dense source/receiver sampling and full azimuthal coverage to produce high-resolution images of the subsurface have led to the deployment of multiple sources across survey areas. A step ahead from multisource acquisition is simultaneous-source acquisition, where multiple sources fire shots at near-simultaneous/random times resulting in overlapping shot records, in comparison to no overlaps during conventional sequential-source acquisition. Adoption of simultaneous-source techniques has helped to improve survey efficiency and data density. The engine that drives simultaneous-source technology is simultaneous-source separation –- a methodology that aims to recover conventional sequential-source data from simultaneous-source data. This is essential because many seismic processing techniques rely on dense and periodic (or regular) source/receiver sampling. We address the challenge of source separation through a combination of tailored simultaneous-source acquisition design and sparsity-promoting recovery via convex optimization using l1 objectives. We use CS metrics to investigate the relationship between marine simultaneous-source acquisition design and data reconstruction fidelity, and consequently assert the importance of randomness in the acquisition system in combination with an appropriate choice for a sparsifying transform (i.e., curvelet transform) in the reconstruction algorithm. We also address the challenge of minimizing the cost of expensive, dense, periodically-sampled and replicated time-lapse surveying and data processing by adapting ideas from distributed compressive sensing. We show that compressive randomized time-lapse surveys need not be replicated to attain acceptable levels of data repeatability, as long as we know the shot positions (post acquisition) to a sufficient degree of accuracy. We conclude by comparing sparsity-promoting and rank-minimization recovery techniques for marine simultaneous-source separation, and demonstrate that recoveries are comparable; however, the latter approach readily scales to large-scale seismic data and is computationally faster.