An improved seismic data completion algorithm using low-rank tensor optimization: Cost reduction and optimal data orientation

ABSTRACT Seismic data are often incomplete due to equipment malfunction, limited source and receiver placement at near and far offsets, and missing crossline data. Seismic data contain redundancies because they are repeatedly recorded over the same or adjacent subsurface regions, causing the data to have a low-rank structure. To recover missing data, one can organize the data into a multidimensional array or tensor and apply a tensor completion method. We can increase the effectiveness and efficiency of low-rank data reconstruction based on tensor singular value decomposition (tSVD) by analyzing the effect of tensor orientation and exploiting the conjugate symmetry of the multidimensional Fourier transform. In fact, these results can be generalized to any order tensor. Relating the singular values of the tSVD to those of a matrix leads to a simplified analysis, revealing that the most square orientation gives the best data structure for low-rank reconstruction. After the first step of the tSVD, a multidimensional Fourier transform, frontal slices of the tensor form conjugate pairs. For each pair, a singular value decomposition can be replaced with a much cheaper conjugate calculation, allowing for faster computation of the tSVD. Using conjugate symmetry in our improved tSVD algorithm reduces the runtime of the inner loop by 35%–50%. We consider synthetic and real seismic data sets from the Viking Graben Region and the Northwest Shelf of Australia arranged as high-dimensional tensors. We compare the tSVD-based reconstruction with traditional methods, projection onto convex sets and multichannel singular spectrum analysis, and we see that the tSVD-based method gives similar or better accuracy and is more efficient, converging with runtimes that are an order of magnitude faster than the traditional methods. In addition, we verify that the most square orientation improves recovery for these examples by 10%–20% compared with the other orientations.