Fast seismic imaging for marine data

Seismic imaging can be formulated as a linear inverse problem where a medium perturbation is obtained via minimization of a least-squares misfit functional. The demand for higher resolution images in more geophysically complex areas drives the need to develop techniques that handle problems of tremendous size with limited computational resources. While seismic imaging is amenable to dimensionality reduction techniques that collapse the data volume into a smaller set of “super-shots”, these techniques break down for complex acquisition geometries such as marine acquisition, where sources and receivers move during acquisition. To meet these challenges, we propose a novel method that combines sparsity-promoting (SP) solvers with random sub-set selection of sequential shots, yielding a SP algorithm that only ever sees a small portion of the full data, enabling its application to very large-scale problems. Application of this technique yields excellent results for a complicated synthetic, which underscores the robustness of sparsity promotion and its suitability for seismic imaging.