Fast and robust common-reflection-surface parameter estimation

The common-reflection-surface (CRS) method offers a stack with higher signal-to-noise ratio at the cost of a time-consuming semblance search to obtain the stacking parameters. We have developed a fast method for extracting the CRS parameters using local slope and curvature. We estimate the slope and curvature with the gradient structure tensor and quadratic structure tensor on stacked data. This is done under the assumption that a stacking velocity is already available. Our method was compared with an existing slope-based method, in which the slope is extracted from prestack data. An experiment on synthetic data shows that our method has increased robustness against noise compared with the existing method. When applied to two real data sets, our method achieves accuracy comparable with the pragmatic and full semblance searches. Our method has the advantage of being approximately two and four orders of magnitude faster than the semblance searches. This research was originally published in Geophysics. © Society of Exploration Geophysicists. Redistribution subject to SEG license or copyright