A Robust Iterative Deblending Method for Simultaneous Source Acquisition

This paper presents a new method for simultaneous source deblending developed in the context of spatial coherency preservation. The deblending is formulated as an inverse problem which is solved in local overlapping windows extracted from the blended data. To constrain the solution, the unknown sources are assumed to be quasipredictive in the spatial domains. During the signal estimation, this will promote tolerance on impulsive blending noise and provide flexibility and robustness in coherency preservation depending upon the signal to noise ratio at a given frequency or within a given window. The proposed method is generic and can be applied to all configurations of simultaneous source acquisition and can deal with an arbitrary number of sources. Tests on numerically blended real towed streamer marine data show good deblending results with an excellent compromise between signal preservation and cross-talk contamination across a wide frequency range, particularly towards the low end. The proposed method is robust and flexible and can be applied in the early stages of a typical marine seismic processing sequence.