A seismic diffraction extraction method for the study of discontinuous geologies using a regularisation algorithm

Seismic diffractions play a vital role in identifying discontinuous geological structures, such as tiny faults and cavities which are important because of their close relationship with the reservoir properties of oil and gas. In this paper, we focus on an extraction method for separation of seismic diffractions. The energy of reflection is usually much stronger than that of the diffraction, thus, removing reflection becomes a key problem for diffraction applications. In order to extract seismic diffractions accurately and stably, we propose an optimised regularisation method based on the local plane-wave equation. By considering two constraints arising from the Sobolev penalty function and the difference operator, we build a stable minimisation model for determining seismic slopes. In computation, an iterative method based on projection onto a convex set for solving the nonlinear minimisation is developed, which can provide fast and accurate solutions. Subtracting the predicted reflections from the seismic image, we can extract the seismic diffractions. Numerical experiments illustrate the effectiveness of the diffraction extraction method in separating tiny faults, scatterers and cavities. Finally, a carbonate reservoir field example is provided to demonstrate the high-resolution capability of the method in revealing small-scale discontinuous geological features.