Velocity analysis using high-resolution semblance based on sparse hyperbolic Radon transform

Semblance measures the lateral coherency of the seismic events in a common mid-point gather, and it has been widely used for the normal-moveout-based velocity estimation. In this paper, we propose a new velocity analysis method by using high-resolution semblance based on sparse hyperbolic Radon transform (SHRT). Conventional semblance can be defined as the ratio of signal energy to total energy in the time gate. We replace the signal energy with the square of the sparse Radon panel and replace the total energy with the sparse Radon panel of the square data. Because of the sparsity-constrained inversion of SHRT, the new approach can produce higher resolution semblance spectra than the conventional semblance. We test this new semblance on synthetic and field data to demonstrate the improvements in velocity analysis.