TO TACKLE THE DECONVOLUTION PROBLEM - A POWERFUL METHOD BASED ON MORE GEOLOGICAL HYPOTHESES.

The approach described in this paper abandons the usual hypothesis (white reflectivity spectra) made by deconvolution methods and employs as alternative information the lateral redundancies which are always present on a seismic section. Our method first estimates the location of high amplitude reflectors with good lateral continuity, by means of an elegant automatic picking program. Based on these locations, a generalized inversion can be used to yield the wavelet emitted by the source, and the amplitude of the main reflection coefficients simultaneously for each trace. All the reflection coefficients are then estimated using the amplitudes and the wavelets computed previously. The various stages of this method which is called Deconvolution-Inversion are illustrated in the paper by means of both synthetic and real examples.