Time-lapse seismic without repetition: reaping the benefits from randomized sampling and joint recovery

In the current paradigm of 4-D seismic, guaranteeing repeatability in acquisition and processing of the baseline and monitor surveys ranks highest amongst the technical challenges one faces in detecting time-lapse signals. By using recent insights from the field of compressive sensing, we show that the condition of survey repeatability can be relaxed as long as we carry out a sparsitypromoting program that exploits shared information between the baseline and monitor surveys. By inverting for the baseline and monitor survey as the common "background", we are able to compute high-fidelity 4-D differences from carefully selected synthetic surveys that have different sets of source/receivers missing. This synthetic example is proof of concept of an exciting new approach to randomized 4-D acquisition where time-lapse signal can be computed as long as the survey details, such as source/receiver locations are known afterwards.