Curvelet-based registration of multi-component seismic waves

•Registration of PP and PS waves is critical in multicomponent seismic exploration.•A curvelet-based method is proposed for registration of seismic waves.•The method is not sensitive to noises and the guess of initial values.•Qualitative and quantitative analyses to real field data are conducted.

Registration of the travel time of PP waves and PS waves on the same coordinate is critical for joint interpretation in multi-component seismic exploration. In this paper, we propose a new curvelet-based registration method to improve the precision of registration, especially for the data with heavy random noises. By making registration in curvelet multiscale spaces from coarser to finer scale, the proposed method is not sensitive to initial values of velocity ratio of PP waves and PS waves. Applications of the new method to real seismic dataset from Shengli Oilfield, China show good registered results in terms of both qualitative and quantitative analysis, in comparison with a traditional registration method and a wavelet-based method.