Sparse multichannel blind deconvolution

Abstract

We developed a sparse multichannel blind deconvolution (SMBD) method. The method is a modification of the multichannel blind deconvolution technique often called Euclid deconvolution, in which the multichannel impulse response of the earth is estimated by solving an homogeneous system of equations. Classical Euclid deconvolution is unstable in the presence of noise and requires the correct estimation of the length of the seismic wavelet. The proposed method, on the other hand, can tolerate moderate levels of noise and does not require a priori knowledge of the length of the wavelet. SMBD solves the homogeneous system of equations arising in Euclid deconvolution by imposing sparsity on the unknown multichannel impulse response. Trivial solutions to the aforementioned homogeneous system of equations are avoided by seeking sparse solutions on the unit sphere. We tested SMBD with synthetic and real data examples. Synthetic examples were used to judge the viability of the method in terms of noise. We found that SMBD gives reasonable estimates of the wavelet and reflectivity series for [Formula: see text]. The results clearly deteriorated when we tried to work on data that were severely contaminated by noise. A real marine data set was also used to test SMBD. In this case, the estimated wavelet was compared with a wavelet estimated by averaging first breaks. The estimated wavelet showed a noticeable resemblance to the average first break with normalized correlation coefficient of 0.92.