Toward the limits of deblending

If we bring sources closer together, they start to `sense' the nearness of each other and their physical behaviour will change. If the separation becomes smaller than half a wavelength, they start to act as one source with new properties (temporal bandwidth, directivity). This fusion process is very complex and nonlinear. To find out whether source fusion has occurred in a blended source array, we image the sources that together form the blended source array. At the same time the deblending concept is extended such that the blending code can be updated simultaneously. Finally, it is proposed to apply multi-level wavefield encoding to realize an extra attenuation of the residual blending noise.