High-performance seismic data compression using wavelet transforms

Chevron recently developed and deployed a seismic data compression algorithm based on multidimensional wavelet transforms. Development was motivated by the large volumes of data acquired in modern 3D marine surveys. We demonstrate an algorithm that can compress seismic data at ratios between 50 and 100 to 1 without losing geophysically significant information. The algorithm was successfully field tested on a vessel in the North Sea in July 1995, demonstrating the feasibility of on board real-time compression and satellite transmission of the data to a land based processing center. Compressed and decompressed data from the field test were processed into a final image. Differences between this image and the image based on the original data are geophysically insignificant, demonstrating that all geophysical information in the original was retained