Fighting the Curse of Dimensionality: Compressive Sensing in Exploration Seismology

Many seismic exploration techniques rely on the collection of massive data volumes that are mined for information during processing. This approach has been extremely successful, but current efforts toward higher resolution images in increasingly complicated regions of Earth continue to reveal fundamental shortcomings in our typical workflows. The “curse” of dimensionality is the main roadblock and is exemplified by Nyquist's sampling criterion, which disproportionately strains current acquisition and processing systems as the size and desired resolution of our survey areas continues to increase.