Depth-domain seismic reflectivity inversion with compressed sensing technique

Abstract

More and more seismic surveys produce 3D seismic images in the depth domain by using prestack depth migration methods, which can present a direct subsurface structure in the depth domain rather than in the time domain. This leads to the increasing need for applications of seismic inversion on the depth-imaged seismic data for reservoir characterization. To address this issue, we have developed a depth-domain seismic inversion method by using the compressed sensing technique with output of reflectivity and band-limited impedance without conversion to the time domain. The formulations of the seismic inversion in the depth domain are similar to time-domain methods, but they implement all the elements in depth domain, for example, a depth-domain seismic well tie. The developed method was first tested on synthetic data, showing great improvement of the resolution on inverted reflectivity. We later applied the method on a depth-migrated field data with well-log data validated, showing a great fit between them and also improved resolution on the inversion results, which demonstrates the feasibility and reliability of the proposed method on depth-domain seismic data.