Near-Offset Gap Reconstruction in Marine Seismic Data Using Global Amplitude Balancing Operator-Enhanced Seismic Interferometry

Near-offset acquisition gaps are a common limitation in marine seismic surveys, where practical source–receiver configurations leave part of the short-offset wavefield unrecorded. The resulting loss of near-offset information can degrade wavefield continuity and reduce the reliability of subsequent seismic processing, subsurface imaging, and geological interpretation. Seismic interferometric reconstruction provides a data-driven approach to recovering the missing near-offset information by generating virtual traces from the recorded wavefield. However, conventional implementations generally rely on local matching filters to compensate for discrepancies between virtual and observed traces, which can introduce amplitude distortions and artifacts in the reconstructed data. To enhance reconstruction accuracy in the presence of near-offset gaps, we propose a novel global amplitude balancing operator (GABO)-enhanced interferometric reconstruction method. The GABO employs focal transformation to globally balance the wavefield along the offset direction by integrating and localizing reflection energy. A projection onto convex sets (POCS)-like iterative framework is further incorporated to improve reconstruction accuracy and robustness. Tests on both synthetic and field marine seismic datasets demonstrated that the proposed method outperforms conventional interferometric reconstruction, particularly in terms of amplitude fidelity, reconstruction accuracy, and offset continuity. The synthetic example showed that the mean correlation coefficient (CC) increased from 0.677 to 0.960, while the mean normalized root-mean-square error (NRMSE) decreased from 0.828 to 0.370 compared with conventional interferometric reconstruction. Furthermore, the method involves physically interpretable parameter selection and exhibits consistent iterative improvement in the synthetic tests.