Estimating Local Slope In The Time-Frequency Domain: Velocity-Independent Seismic Imaging In The Near Surface

Seismic reflection processing for multicomponent data is very time consuming. To automatically streamline and shorten this process, a new approach for estimating the local event slope (local static shift) in the time-frequency domain is proposed and tested. The seismic event slope is determined by comparing the local phase content of Stockwell transformed signals. This calculation allows for noninterfering arrivals to be aligned by iteratively correcting trace by trace. Alternatively, the calculation can be used in a velocity-independent imaging framework with the possibility of exporting the determined time and velocities for each common midpoint gather, which leads to a more robust moveout correction. Synthetic models are used to test the robustness of the calculation and compare it directly to an existing method of local slope estimation. Compared to dynamic time warping, our method is more robust to noise but less robust to large time shifts, which limits our method to shorter geophone spacing. We apply the calculation to near-surface shear-wave data and compare it directly to semblance/normal-moveout processing. Examples demonstrate that the calculation yields an accurate local slope estimate and can produce sections of better or equal quality to sections processed using the conventional approach with much less user time input. It also serves as a first example of velocity-independent processing applied to near-surface reflection data.