Full-Wavefield Inversion of Marine Streamer Data with the Encoded Simultaneous Source Method

Recent developments in simultaneous source techniques for full-wavefield inversion have shown promise in significantly reducing the computational cost. The key is in reducing the large number of individual shots with one or a few encoded shots, thereby providing computational savings for both forward simulation and gradient computation. However, the majority of the applications of this approach have focused on a fixed-receiver geometry, where each receiver records all shots in the survey. Although a fixed receiver geometry is a natural application of this method, few surveys (such as marine streamer) use this geometry. Moving receiver geometries are the common practice in marine and land surveys. Unfortunately, the simultaneous source method using an L2 objective function can not be easily extended to non-fixed (moving) receiver geometry in a straightforward manner. This is because the recorded data are deficient in traces compared to the simulated data generated from an encoded source. We develop a new approach to overcome this problem and propose the use of a cross-correlation objective function instead of the conventional L2 objective function to invert non-fixed spread simultaneous source data. We demonstrate our methodology using a marine streamer synthetic example.