First Arrival Enhancement and Extrapolation via Third-Order Cumulant Interferometry Method

First arrival enhancement can improve the picking accuracy. Traditional seismic interferometry is based on the correlation calculation of multiple iterations to enhance the first arrival. Besides being sensitive to nonuniform Gaussian noise, the correlated and iterative operations causing seismic wavelet deformation with positive sidelobes are the main problems. While the fourth-order cumulant (CUM4) has been introduced into interferometry methods to suppress the coherent Gaussian noise, seismic wavelet deformation still exists. We propose to use the third-order cumulant (CUM3) diagonal slice to extract precise time delay information between different seismic traces. This modification effectively reduces the energy of the positive sidelobes caused by the correlation calculation. To reduce iteration times, we calculate both forward and reverse time delays between each trace and other traces, rather than selecting a single reference trace. This optimization increases the stacking number between receiver points. Experimental results on simulated data not only demonstrate the effective suppression of positive sidelobes, but also show the improvement in the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Applications to field data also obtain the first arrival information with high resolution. Moreover, we extend the application of the CUM3 diagonal slice to the extrapolated super-virtual interference (ESVRI) method and also obtain competitive results.