Latest views of the sparse Radon transform

Abstract The Radon transform (RT) suffers from the typical problems of loss of resolution and aliasing that arise as a consequence of incomplete information, including limited aperture and discretization. Sparseness in the Radon domain is a valid and useful criterion for supplying this missing information, equivalent somehow to assuming smooth amplitude variation in the transition between known and unknown (missing) data. Applying this constraint while honoring the data can become a serious challenge for routine seismic processing because of the very limited processing time available, in general, per common midpoint. To develop methods that are robust, easy to use and flexible to adapt to different problems we have to pay attention to a variety of algorithms, operator design, and estimation of the hyperparameters that are responsible for the regularization of the solution. In this paper, we discuss fast implementations for several varieties of RT in the time and frequency domains. An iterative conjugate gradient algorithm with fast Fourier transform multiplication is used in all cases. To preserve the important property of iterative subspace methods of regularizing the solution by the number of iterations, the model weights are incorporated into the operators. This turns out to be of particular importance, and it can be understood in terms of the singular vectors of the weighted transform. The iterative algorithm is stopped according to a general cross validation criterion for subspaces. We apply this idea to several known implementations and compare results in order to better understand differences between, and merits of, these algorithms.