Automatic velocity analysis using high-resolution hyperbolic Radon transform

Velocity analysis is crucial in reflection seismic imaging. Velocity picking is widely used in the industry for building the initial velocity model. When the size of the seismic data becomes extremely large, we cannot afford corresponding human endeavor that is required by the velocity picking. In such situations, an automatic velocity-picking algorithm is highly demanded. We propose a novel automatic velocity-analysis algorithm that is based on the high-resolution hyperbolic Radon transform. We formulate the automatic velocity-analysis problem as a constrained optimization problem. To solve the optimization problem with a hard constraint on the sparsity and distribution of the velocity spectrum, we relax it to a more familiar L1-regularized optimization problem via two steps. We use the iterative preconditioned least-squares method to solve the L1-regularized problem and then apply the hard constraint of the target optimization during the iterative inversion. Using both synthetic and field data examples,...