Special Issue on Technological Advances in Seismic Data Processing and Imaging

Seismic exploration is a geophysical method with deeper exploration capabilities and higher resolution than potential geophysical methods [1], and has been widely used in the fields of oil and gas exploration, mineral exploration, engineering, and environmental exploration [2,3,4]. This Special Issue will focus on the development of advanced seismic data processing and imaging technologies and their successful application.

There are a total of 23 papers presented in this Special Issue, and we divide them into the following directions. In the seismic noise elimination section, five papers introduce their new methods to deal with multiples, periodic noise, coherent noise, and ground roll. Xiao et al. developed an iterative virtual event internal multiple suppression method for post-stack data and used it with the Tarim data successfully. Wu et al. presented another alternative based on sparse parabolic radon transform for multiple attenuation. Sun et al. proposed a new method to attenuate periodic noise based on sparse representation. Based on the multi-scale and multi-direction properties of the non-subsampled Shearlet transform, Yu et al. proposed a seismic coherent noise removal method. Liang et al. applied multivariate empirical mode decomposition to multi-component seismic data for the purposes of attenuating ground roll, and this method is more robust than traditional empirical mode decomposition. In the migration and inversion section, there are a total of seven papers about new improvements and applications. Zhou et al. presented a modified inverse scattering imaging condition in the reverse time migration to separate the effect of the impedance and velocity perturbations from the reflectivity. Zhou et al. discussed the reverse time migration imaging of compressional waves (P waves) and horizontally polarized shear waves (SH waves) of seismic data, together with P- and SH shear wave-constrained velocity model building, and the imaging quality of the Sanhu area in Qaidam Basin was greatly improved. Zhou et al. used the combined compact difference scheme and the combined super-compact difference scheme for the numerical simulation of the shear-wave reverse time migration, which proved to be practical and effective. Song et al. reported a method to improve insufficient illumination in reverse time migration in the presence of a shielding effect on seismic waves caused by overburden rock. Li et al. proposed a new least square migration method in the imaging domain to overcome unstable convergence and excessive computational cost problems. Sun et al. proposed a method for establishing the initial inversion model based on the velocity spectrum and Siamese network for the velocity inversion. Rachman presented a case study that performed travel time tomography in order to image the subsurface and approximate the Molucca Sea Plate subduction angle beneath Sulawesi’s north arm. Gouda et al. reported a study that aims at estimating zero-offset acoustic and shear impedances based on partial-stack inversion. There are also two papers in this section that introduce the progress in passive seismic exploration. Fang et al. used synchro-squeezed continuous wavelet transform to eliminate the automatic noise in the Sichuan project. Liu et al. proposed a 3D method for passive reflection exploration, which can reduce the computing intensity. Seismic wave propagation is always a hot topic for research, and in this section, there are four papers about this field. Liu et al. discussed the simulation of elastic wave propagations, and the Poisson disk node generation algorithm and the centroid Voronoi node adjustment algorithm were combined to obtain an even and random node distribution to improve the accuracy of the simulation. Jin et al. studied seismic attenuation, focusing on accurately predicting the velocity dispersion at low porosity and permeability. Yang et al. applied the multi-axis perfectly matched layer to the wave-field simulations in anisotropic viscoelastic media to overcome instability. Sun et al. simulated the seismic wave propagation of the translational and rotational motions in two-dimensional isotropic and transverse isotropic media with a vertical axis of symmetry media under different source mechanisms with the staggered-grid finite-difference method, and also analyzed the characteristics. Artificial intelligence technology is also widely used in seismic data processing and interpretation, and there are three papers on this field in this Special Issue. Li et al. reported on velocity analysis, in which a modified U-Net framework is proposed and applied directly to the seismic shot gathersto identify anomalies in the early stage of velocity analysis and provide a suitable initial model. Wu et al. proposed a modified U-Net architecture in fault interpretation. Zheng et al. reported a multi-task deep learning solution for the impendence inversion when the number of logging curves is limited. In this Special Issue, we also present a paper about near-surface structure imaging. In order to realize a rapid, accurate, robust near-surface seismic imaging, a minimum variance spatial smoothing beamforming method is proposed.

The research field on seismic data processing and imaging is very extensive. Although we have published 23 articles in this Special Issue, there are still many interesting topics that have not been discussed. We hope to have more opportunities to publish further studies in the future, to foster further communication on this topic.