Seismic absorption compensation: A least squares inverse scheme

The problem of instability plagues conventional inverse Q filtering. We formulate the deabsorption problem as an inverse problem in terms of least squares and impose regularization by means of Bayes’ theorem. The solution is iterative and nonparametric and returns a reflectivity that has been constrained to be sparse. The inverse scheme is tested on both synthetic and real data and the results obtained demonstrate the viability of the approach.