How Multicomponent Data Enable Effective Seismic Interference Elimination from Marine Acquisitions

We present a fast and effective method to detect and eliminate seismic interference from 3D marine data measured by four-component (4C) streamers. The method we propose acts on each shot record independently from the others, relying on the pressure wavefield being reconstructed (eventually deghosted) on a 2D grid, densely sampled in both the inline and the crossline directions. Such reconstruction is enabled by matching-pursuit-based signal processing techniques proposed recently in the literature that have the capability to explicitly use the information of the multicomponent measurements. Without these measurements, the reconstruction capability in the receiver’ domain would be seriously compromised by the strong crossline aliasing. We show that the interference can be easily isolated and removed from the data, without affecting the seismic signal of interest after the data are reconstructed on a dense grid of receivers. When supported by vector based seismic interference detection, this technique has the potential of being automated and applied directly during the acquisition timeframe.