Simultaneous source separation by shot collocation and strength variation

Simultaneous shooting offers opportunities for significant cost savings in seismic data acquisitions. The most common strategy uses random delay shots where source separation is achieved during the processing stage, thereby doubling source densities. We have determined that the creation of a collocated source survey, where shots are repeated simul-taneously at multiple positions, is a viable alternative strat-egy, with the additional benefit that it may increase source density even further while keeping the acquisition duration unchanged. Source separation is achieved using overcom-plete independent component analysis by first by applying a directional wavelet transform to separate source signals with different slowness, then estimating the mixing matrix, followed by solving an optimization problem with an energy constraint combined with a sparseness inducing prior and obtaining the required waveforms. Synthetic tests find aver-age reconstruction quality on the order of 22.1, 15.4, and 8.4 dB if, respectively, three, four, or five shots are acquired in two mixtures. Examination of the true versus obtained zero-offset sections also demonstrates the robustness of our signal recovery strategy. The advantage of shot colloca-tion over conventional acquisitions is that it may triple or even quadruple the source density for unchanged acquisition durations with superior reconstruction results compared with dithered acquisitions using similar blending factors.