Efficient Lossy Compression for Seismic Processing

Most advanced imaging tools available nowadays need massive computing capabilities. Reverse time migration (RTM) and full waveform inversion (FWI) are among the most sophisticated tools for seismic imaging. As both tools are based upon the simulation of the complete seismic wavefield, large computing platforms are required in order to use such imaging tools for large 3D surveys. One of the most important computational issues is related with the amount of data that need to be transfer to/from disk, considering that I/O is usually orders of magnitude slower than computational resources such as memory or processors. Hence, reducing the pressure over the I/O is a key topic for any seismic system in order to obtain good performance. In this work we present a compression method based on a re-quantization algorithm, that use less bits to represent each value than those needed in the original dataset.