Reduction of normal-moveout stretch using nonstationary scaling transformation in time-frequency domain

Abstract

The normal-moveout (NMO) stretch causes decrease in the dominant frequency of seismic wavelet after conventional NMO correction and severely damages the quality of the stacked data for shallower reflectors at far offsets. Muting, which is commonly used to handle this problem, reduces seismic fold and negatively affects results of the amplitude-variation-with-offset analysis within the stretched area. We found a novel approach to reduce the stretching phenomenon through compensating the lost frequencies by increasing the dominant frequency of the seismic wavelet before applying the NMO correction. The added so-called compensated frequencies are defined according to the difference between the dominant frequency of the original seismic wavelet and the assumed stretched wavelet after the NMO correction. The corresponding procedure considers frequency content of each time sample along each trace in the time-frequency domain using the Gabor transform. As such, the dominant frequency of the seismic wavelets is increased in a nonstationary manner. Performance of our method is evaluated by applying it on the synthetic and field data examples. The obtained results suggest that this approach provides common-midpoint (CMP) gathers with reduced stretching effect, with the potential to be considered as another alternative for nonstretch NMO correction. However, it should be noted that the presented method resolves neither the problem of intersecting events nor the multiples in the CMP gather. This method also cannot handle highly contaminated noise data and does not contribute in removing multiples during the frequency compensation process.