A new paper is added to the collection of reproducible documents: Plane-wave Sobel attribute for discontinuity enhancement in seismic images

Discontinuity enhancement attributes are commonly used to facilitate the interpretation process by enhancing edges in seismic images and providing a quantitative measure of the significance of discontinuous features. These attributes require careful pre-processing to maintain geologic features and suppress acquisition and processing artifacts which may be artificially detected as a geologic edge.
We propose the plane-wave Sobel attribute, a modification of the classic Sobel filter, by orienting the filter along seismic structures using plane-wave destruction and plane-wave shaping. The plane-wave Sobel attribute can be applied directly to a seismic image to efficiently and effectively enhance discontinuous features, or to a coherence image to create a sharper and more detailed image. Two field benchmark data examples with many faults and channel features from offshore New Zealand and offshore Nova Scotia demonstrate the effectiveness of this method compared to conventional coherence attributes. The results are reproducible using the Madagascar software package.

A new paper is added to the collection of reproducible documents: Full-waveform inversion using seislet regularization

Because of inaccurate, incomplete and inconsistent waveform records, full waveform inversion (FWI) in the framework of local optimization approach may not have a unique solution and thus remains an ill-posed inverse problem. To improve the robustness of FWI, we present a new model regularization approach, which enforces the sparsity of solutions in the seislet domain. The construction of seislet basis functions requires structural information, which can be estimated iteratively from migration images. We implement FWI with seislet regularization using nonlinear shaping regularization, and impose sparseness by applying soft thresholding on the updated model in the seislet domain at each iteration of the data fitting process. The main extra computational cost of the method relative to standard FWI is the cost of applying forward and inverse seislet transforms at each iteration. This cost is almost negligible compared to the cost of solving wave equations. Numerical tests using the synthetic Marmousi model demonstrate that seislet regularization can greatly improve the robustness of FWI by recovering high-resolution velocity models, particularly in the presence of strong crosstalk artifacts from simultaneous sources or strong random noise in the data.

A new paper is added to the collection of reproducible documents: Diffraction imaging and time-migration velocity analysis using oriented velocity continuation

We perform seismic diffraction imaging and time-migration velocity analysis by separating diffractions from specular reflections and decomposing them into slope components. We image slope components using migration velocity extrapolation in time-space-slope coordinates. The extrapolation is described by a convection-type partial differential equation and implemented in a highly parallel manner in the Fourier domain. Synthetic and field data experiments show that the proposed algorithms are able to detect accurate time-migration velocities by measuring the flatness of diffraction events in slope gathers for both single and multiple offset data.