Swell Correction of Shallow Marine Seismic Reflection Data Using Genetic Algorithms

Some CMP gathers acquired from shallow marine seismic reflection survey in offshore Korea do not show the hyperbolic trend of moveout. It originated from so-called swell effect of source and streamer, which are towed under rough sea surface during the data acquisition. The observed time deviations of NMO-corrected traces can be entirely ascribed to the swell effect. To correct these time deviations, a residual statics is introduced using Genetic Algorithms (GA) into the swell correction. A new class of global optimization methods known as GA has recently been developed in the field of Artificial Intelligence and has a resemblance with the genetic evolution of biological systems. The basic idea in using GA as an optimization method is to represent a population of possible solutions or models in a chromosome-type encoding and manipulate these encoded models through simulated reproduction, crossover and mutation. GA parameters used in this paper are as follows: population size Q=40, probability of multiple-point crossover P$_c$=0.6, linear relationship of mutation probability P$_m$ from 0.002 to 0.004, and gray code representation are adopted. The number of the model participating in tournament selection (nt) is 3, and the number of expected copies desired for the best population member in the scaling of fitness is 1.5. With above parameters, an optimization run was iterated for 101 generations. The combination of above parameters are found to be optimal for the convergence of the algorithm. The resulting reflection events in every NMO-corrected CMP gather show good alignment and enhanced quality stack section.