Reflection Seismic Interferometry via Higher-Order Cumulants to Solve Normal Moveout Stretch

Normal moveout (NMO) correction is an important step in seismic data processing. Conventional NMO methods, however, suffer from serious stretching distortions, especially at the shallow layer and far-offset traces. These distortions are not conducive to subsequent data processing at all. Reflection seismic interferometry, the cores of which are cross-correlation and stacking, is the latest technology to achieve noise suppression and signal enhancement. Compared with cross-correlation, higher-order cumulants (HOCs) have a better performance of time delay estimation and signal enhancement. To fully exploit its advantages, we propose reflection seismic interferometry based on HOC instead of cross-correlation to solve NMO stretching in this letter. Our proposed method is first tested on synthetic examples and then applied to field data from eastern China. The corresponding results demonstrate that the proposed data-driven method, without the need for velocity information, not only solves the far-offset traces’ stretching distortions of NMO correction, but also has a better noise suppression effect compared with the other two existing methods. These advancements are important to improve the resolution of seismic data and increase amplitude fidelity.