Correlation-Based Interferometry Method to Enhance Near-Surface Reflection Signals in Surface Active Seismic Exploration

In surface active seismic exploration, the near-surface imaging based on reflection signals provides valuable information for mineral exploration and deeper resources. However, the strong noises at near surface and stretching effects at nonzero offsets with conventional seismic data processing method severely damage the seismic reflection signals with low fold at near surface. The innovative method for the enhancement of seismic signals is the seismic interferometry method. However, due to the one-sided illumination, the seismic interferometry is still not suitable for the retrieval of reflection signals in most practical situations. In this article, we present the correlation-based interferometry (CI) method to enhance the reflection signals for near-surface imaging using the first cross correlation to construct virtual reflection signals and the second cross correlation to achieve the interferometric normal move-out (INMO) correction of the seismic reflection events with no stretching, which keeps the high resolution of near-surface reflection signals. Meanwhile, because of constructive interference stack, the CI method can significantly improve the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of reflection signals. The synthetic and field seismic data examples illustrate that the data-driven CI method performs better than the conventional stack (CS) method based on the velocity model for the near-surface reflection imaging.