Ordering cross-spread gathers

Abstract

Seismic processing on cross-spread gathers is a valuable but underexploited strategy. To do it properly, sources from a single source line and receivers from a single receiver line must be ordered in a physically sensible way, so that adjacent sources or receivers on a surface diagram are physically near each other. But determining such an ordering is a challenge on irregularly acquired land data. I propose novel automatic ordering algorithms using tools from graph theory that minimize large gaps and preserve the sequential patterns found even in highly irregular acquisition. Java source code is available.