Low-rank methods for on-the-fly slicing & dicing of seismic data & image volumes

Conventional oil and gas fields are increasingly difficult to explore and produce, which calls for more complex wave-equation based inversion (WEI) algorithms that require dense long-offset samplings. These requirements result in an exponential growth in data volumes and prohibitive demands on computational resources. In this work, we propose a fast, resilient, and scalable wave-equation based inversion methodology for both the data and image-domain, which can handle complicated wave physics. First we show that both the data and image domains exhibit low-rank structure in a transform-domain, which can be exploited to compress the dense data or image volumes. Then, by accessing information from the compressed volumes on-the fly, we devise a scalable computational inversion framework driven by gradient calculations, which works with small subsets of source experiments. In the full-waveform inversion context, we demonstrate the efficacy of low-rank interpolation to improve downstream inversion results compared to merely inverting the velocity model using the subsampled data volume directly. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework on two different waveform-inversion formulations, specifically performing full-waveform inversion on 5D data set generated using the overthrust model, and wave-equation based migration velocity analysis on the Marmousi model. This is joint work with Curt Da Silva and Yiming Zhang.

https://slim.gatech.edu/Publications/Public/Conferences/SINBAD/2016/Fall...