Published as IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Letters, 14, no. 8, 1213-1217, (2017)

Application of principal component analysis in weighted stacking of seismic data

Jianyong Xie, Wei Chen, Dong Zhang, Shaohuan Zu, and Yangkang Chen
State Key Laboratory of Petroleum Resources and Prospecting
China University of Petroleum
Fuxue Road 18th
Beijing, China, 102200
gsw19900128@126.com
Key Laboratory of Exploration Technology for Oil and Gas Resources of Ministry of Education, Yangtze University, Wuhan, Hubei, China, 430100, Hubei Cooperative Innovation Center of Unconventional Oil and Gas, Wuhan, Hubei, China, 430100, and State Key Laboratory of Geodesy and Earth's Dynamics, Institute of Geodesy and Geophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Wuhan, China, 430077, chenwei2014@yangtzeu.edu.cn.
gsw19900128@126.com
Jackson School of Geosciences
The University of Texas at Austin
University Station, Box X
Austin, TX 78713-8924, USA
Email: ykchen@utexas.edu

Abstract:

Optimal stacking of multiple datasets plays a significant role in many scientific domains. The quality of stacking will affect the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and amplitude fidelity of the stacked image. In seismic data processing, the similarity-weighted stacking makes use of the local similarity between each trace and a reference trace as the weight to stack the flattened prestack seismic data after normal moveout (NMO) correction. The traditional reference trace is an approximated zero-offset trace that is calculated from a direct arithmetic mean of the data matrix along the spatial direction. However, in the case that the data matrix contains abnormal mis-aligned trace, erratic and non-gaussian random noise, the accuracy of the approximated zero-offset trace would be greatly affected, thereby further influence the quality of stacking. We propose a novel weighted stacking method that is based on principal component analysis (PCA). The principal components of the data matrix, namely the useful signals, are extracted based on a low-rank decomposition method by solving an optimization problem with a low-rank constraint. The optimization problem is solved via a common singular value decomposition algorithm. The low-rank decomposition of the data matrix will alleviate the influence of abnormal trace, erratic and non-gaussian random noise, thus will be more robust than the traditional alternatives. We use both synthetic and field data examples to show the successful performance of the proposed approach.