Spectral Gap-Based Seismic Survey Design

Seismic imaging in challenging sedimentary basins and reservoirs requires acquiring, processing, and imaging very large volumes of data (tens of terabytes). To reduce the cost of acquisition and the time from acquiring the data to producing a subsurface image, novel acquisition systems based on compressive sensing (CS), low-rank matrix recovery (LRMR), and randomized sampling have been developed and implemented. These approaches allow practitioners to achieve dense wavefield reconstruction from a substantially reduced number of field samples. However, designing acquisition surveys suited for this new sampling paradigm remains a critical and challenging role in oil, gas, and geothermal exploration. Typical random designs studied in the LRMR and CS literature are difficult to achieve by standard industry hardware. For practical purposes, a compromise between stochastic and realizable samples is needed. In this article, we propose a deterministic and computationally cheap tool to alleviate randomized acquisition design, prior to survey deployment and large-scale optimization. We consider universal and deterministic matrix completion results in the context of seismology, where a bipartite graph representation of the source–receiver layout allows for the respective spectral gap (SG) to act as a quality metric for wavefield reconstruction. We provide realistic scenarios to demonstrate the utility of the SG as a flexible tool that can be incorporated into existing survey design workflows for successful seismic data acquisition via low-rank and sparse signal recovery.