Hui Zhou

High angle prestack depth migration with absorption compensation

The absorption effect of actual subsurface media can weaken wavefield energy, decrease the dominating frequency, and further lead to reduced resolution. In migration, some actions can be taken to compensate for the absorption effect and enhance the resolution. In this paper, we derive a one-way wave equation with an attenuation term based on the timespace domain high angle one-way wave equation. A complicated geological model is then designed and synthetic shot gathers are simulated with acoustic wave equations without and with an absorbing term. The derived one-way wave equation is applied to the migration of the synthetic gathers without and with attenuation compensation for the simulated shot gathers. Three migration profiles are obtained. The first and second profiles are from the shot gathers without and with attenuation using the migration method without compensation, the third one is from the shot gathers with attenuation using the migration method with compensation. The first and third profiles are almost the same, and the second profile is different from the others below the absorptive layers. The amplitudes of the interfaces below the absorptive layers are weak because of their absorption. This method is also applied to field data. It is concluded from the migration examples that the migration method discussed in this paper is feasible.

Bayesian prestack seismic inversion with a self-adaptive Huber-Markov random-field edge protection scheme

Seismic inversion is a highly ill-posed problem, due to many factors such as the limited seismic frequency bandwidth and inappropriate forward modeling. To obtain a unique solution, some smoothing constraints, e.g., the Tikhonov regularization are usually applied. The Tikhonov method can maintain a global smooth solution, but cause a fuzzy structure edge. In this paper we use Huber-Markov random-field edge protection method in the procedure of inverting three parameters, P-velocity, S-velocity and density. The method can avoid blurring the structure edge and resist noise. For the parameter to be inverted, the Huber-Markov random-field constructs a neighborhood system, which further acts as the vertical and lateral constraints. We use a quadratic Huber edge penalty function within the layer to suppress noise and a linear one on the edges to avoid a fuzzy result. The effectiveness of our method is proved by inverting the synthetic data without and with noises. The relationship between the adopted constraints and the inversion results is analyzed as well.

The anti-correlation method for removing harmonic distortion in vibroseis slip-sweep data

The slip-sweep technique is one of the high-efficiency, high-fidelity, and environmental vibroseis seismic prospecting techniques which consists of a vibrator group sweeping without waiting for the previous group’s sweep to terminate. The cycle time can be reduced drastically and hence the production efficiency can be increased significantly but harmonic distortion of one sweep will leak into the record of the other sweep. In this paper, we propose an anti-correlation method for removing harmonic distortion in vibroseis data. This method is based on decomposition of the ground force signal into fundamental and harmonic components. Then the corresponding anti-correlation operator can be computed to estimate the energy of each harmonic after correlating the vibroseis data with the corresponding harmonic component. Finally, the vibroseis harmonic noise to be removed can be obtained by subtracting the extracted harmonic noise from the traces of the previous group’s sweep. The advantage of the proposed method is that it can process both uncorrelated and correlated vibroseis seismic data. Moreover, the algorithm is simple, stable, and computationally fast. Especially, the significant contribution of this method is a considerable reduction in the harmonic without any alteration of the desired signals. The method was tested on both synthetic and field data sets to validate the good harmonic noise suppression results.

Geophone-seabed coupling effect and its correction

By summing geophone and hydrophone data with opposite polarity responses to water layer reverberation, the ocean bottom cable dual-sensor acquisition technique can effectively eliminate reverberation, broaden the frequency bandwidth, and improve both the resolution and fidelity of the seismic data. It is thus widely used in industry. However, it is difficult to ensure good coupling of the geophones with the seabed because of the impact of ocean flow, seafloor topography, and field operations; therefore, geophone data are seriously affected by the transfer function of the geophone-seabed coupling system. As a result, geophone data frequently have low signal-to-noise ratios (S/N), which causes large differences in amplitude, frequency, and phases between geophone and hydrophone data that severely affect dual-sensor summation. In contrast, the hydrophone detects changes in brine pressure and has no coupling issues with the seabed; thus, hydrophone data always have good S/N. First, in this paper, the mathematical expression of the transfer function between geophone and seabed is presented. Second, the transfer function of the geophone-seabed is estimated using hydrophone data as reference traces, and finally, the coupling correction based on the estimated transfer function is implemented. Using this processing, the amplitude and phase differences between geophone and hydrophone data are removed, and the S/N of the geophone data are improved. Synthetic and real data examples then show that our method is feasible and practical.

Random noise attenuation by f-x spatial projection-based complex empirical mode decomposition predictive filtering

The frequency-space (f-x) empirical mode decomposition (EMD) denoising method has two limitations when applied to nonstationary seismic data. First, subtracting the first intrinsic mode function (IMF) results in signal damage and limited denoising. Second, decomposing the real and imaginary parts of complex data may lead to inconsistent decomposition numbers. Thus, we propose a new method named f-x spatial projection-based complex empirical mode decomposition (CEMD) prediction filtering. The proposed approach directly decomposes complex seismic data into a series of complex IMFs (CIMFs) using the spatial projection-based CEMD algorithm and then applies f-x predictive filtering to the stationary CIMFs to improve the signal-to-noise ratio. Synthetic and real data examples were used to demonstrate the performance of the new method in random noise attenuation and seismic signal preservation.