Blind Seismic Reflectivity Inversion of Prestack Angle Gathers With Angle-Based Regularization

The angle gathers are the data basis of prestack seismic inversion, and their resolution directly determines the resolution of the inverted elastic parameters. Seismic reflectivity inversion (SRI) is a technique that is able to estimate reflectivity from seismic data and consequently improve the resolution of seismic data. However, the existing SRI method for angle gathers faces two problems: 1) the assumption that the wavelet is known does not align with reality and 2) compared with the exact Zoeppritz equation, approximation equations will introduce errors in large angles. To overcome these shortcomings, in this article, we propose a new blind SRI method for enhancing the resolution of angle gathers. This method can simultaneously build the wavelet and reflectivity of angle gathers without the need for a predefined wavelet, and an angle-based regularization term is constructed to ensure continuity in angle, especially in noisy cases. We use both synthetic experiments on a modified Marmousi model and also a field data experiment using a dataset from the Hampson–Russell software to assess the performance of the proposed method and compare its performance with an existing method. The results clearly validate the effectiveness of the proposed method and its superiority over the existing method in producing high-quality reflectivity models for angle gathers.