Low‐frequency seismic deghosting in a compressed domain using parabolic dictionary learning

Deghosting is an important technique in the marine seismic industry, as it plays a crucial role in mitigating the effects of ghost reflections from the sea surface, which can significantly impact the accuracy and resolution of subsurface imaging. In recent years, various acquisition‐based techniques have been developed to tackle the challenge of removing receiver–ghost reflections, which is the focus of our paper. These state‐of‐the‐art approaches, such as dual‐sensor or multicomponent towed streamer acquisitions, have demonstrated exceptional accuracy by combining pressure and particle motion data. However, such methods face limitations when dealing with low frequencies due to heavy noise contamination in the particle motion data. Consequently, ghost‐free data reconstruction at low frequencies typically relies on processing‐based approaches, which exclusively utilize recorded pressure data. This study presents a novel deghosting method for low‐frequency applications based on parabolic dictionary learning, which relies solely on recorded pressure data. The proposed method has the advantage of being applicable directly in a compressed domain, eliminating the need for data decompression prior to the deghosting process when compression is applied before the processing steps. This not only reduces costs related to data storage and transfer but also provides a cost‐effective alternative to conventional deghosting by operating directly on the compressed data format, which is smaller in size. The effectiveness of the proposed method was evaluated using both synthetic and field datasets. The results obtained from a synthetic data example indicate that the proposed method achieves similar results to an industry‐standard frequency–wavenumber method, while achieving a compression rate of over 7. Furthermore, the method was tested using a field dataset consisting of a full sail‐line of marine seismic acquisition. The comparison of 2D pre‐stack migrated images between the proposed method and the industry‐standard frequency–wavenumber method revealed insignificant differences, while achieving a compression ratio higher than 5 when our method was used.