When accompanied by the appropriate algorithmic approach, seismic imaging is an application that can take advantage of massively parallel computer systems. Three-dimensional (3D) prestack time migration (PSTM) and pre-stack depth migration (PSDM) are key components of seismic imaging and require very large computing resources. In this paper, we show that execution of these algorithms can be dra...

Remote sensing, medical imaging, and time-lapse seismic monitoring have common challenges in change detection. In this paper we introduce a statistical procedure developed in medical imaging to determine if anomalies in time-lapse seismic data are statistically significant. Using seismic data redundancy, we construct maps of statistical variation and apply an adaptive thresholding to them. The ...

S U M M A R Y One way of developing a wave-equation approach to seismic imaging is based on the concept of downward continuation of observed surface reflection data. Seismic imaging is typically based on the single scattering approximation, and assumes the knowledge of a smooth background model in which the mentioned downward continuation is carried out using the double-squareroot (DSR) equatio...

I present a parallel matrix-free framework for frequency-domain seismic modeling, imaging and inversion. The framework provides basic building blocks for designing and testing optimization-based formulations of both linear and non-linear seismic inverse problems. By overloading standard linear-algebra operations, such as matrixvector multiplications, standard optimization packages can be used t...

Oilfield Review Summer 2010: 22, no. 2. Copyright © 2010 Schlumberger. For help in preparation of this article, thanks to Abdulmohsin Al-Dulaijan, South Rub Al-Khali Co. Ltd, South Rub Al-Khali, Saudi Arabia; Jarrah Al-Genai, Kuwait Oil Company, Kuwait City, Kuwait; Danny Burns, Beach Petroleum, Adelaide, South Australia, Australia; Daniele Colombo, Saudi Aramco, Dhahran, Saudi Arabia; Dennis C...

Irregularly and sparsely sampled seismic data that has been shot with a predominant azimuth for long offsets can be completely reconstructed. Our method uses reposting along receiver lines to exact crossline positions, followed by least squares reconstruction in the midpoint-offset domain. This reconstruction scheme has been applied to a 3D marine dataset from the North Sea. Various aspects and...

I show that, by estimating local event slopes in prestack seismic reflection data, it is possible to accomplish all common time-domain imaging tasks, from normal moveout to prestack time migration, without the need to estimate seismic velocities or any other attributes. Local slopes contain complete information about the reflection geometry. Once they are estimated, seismic velocities and all o...

The correlation of ambient vibrations of the Earth yields the impulse response between two passive sensors as if one was a source. This provides the opportunity to image the Earth beneath regional seismic arrays. In this paper, we present imaging of the lithosphere in Europe based on surface Rayleigh waves extracted from continuous record of the seismic noise. We also recall a brief history of ...

This is the first paper in a two-part series that describes a massively parallel code that performs 2D frequency-domain full-waveform inversion of wide-aperture seismic data for imaging complex structures. Full waveform inversion methods, namely quantitative seismic imaging methods based on the resolution of the full wave equation, are computationally expensive. Therefore, designing efficient a...

Overburden layers continue to be a problem for recording and analyzing information in seismic surveys. This study aims to examine the effects of overburden layers on seismic wave propagation and imaging. In the investigation, we look at the effect of low velocity, low density overburden on seismic imaging. To investigate this problem, a finite difference elastic wave modelling study was conduct...