Survey design towards optimum reflectivity and velocity estimates directly from blended and irregularly-sampled data

The application of blended acquisition along with irregular acquisition geometries contributes to the economic perspective of a seismic survey. The joint migration inversion scheme is capable of directly processing the data acquired in this way, i.e., without deblending or data reconstruction, and of subsequently estimating both reflectively and velocity models. The workflow proposed in this study aims to design the source blending operator as well as detector and source sampling operators. The approach iteratively computes these parameters in such a way that the quality of reflectivity and velocity models, which are directly estimated from blended and irregularly-sampled data, is adequate. The workflow integrates a genetic algorithm and a convolutional neural network to derive optimum parameters. Bio-inspired operators enable the simultaneous update of the blending and sampling operators. To relate the choice of survey parameters to the performance of a joint migration inversion, we utilize a convolutional neural network. The applied network architecture discards suboptimal solutions among newly generated ones. Conversely, it passes optimal ones to the subsequent step, which successfully enhances the efficiency of the proposed approach. The resultant acquisition scenario yields a notable enhancement in both reflectivity and velocity estimates attributed solely to the choice of survey parameters.