Learned Proximal Operator for Solving Seismic Deconvolution Problem

Seismic deconvolution is an essential step in seismic data processing that aims to extract layer information from noisy observed traces. In general, this is an ill-posed problem with non-unique solutions. Due to the sparse nature of the reflectivity sequence, spike-promoting regularizers such as the $\ell_1$-norm are frequently used. They either require rigorous coefficient tuning or strong assumptions about reflectivity, such as assuming reflectivity as sparse signals with known sparsity levels and zero-mean Gaussian noise with known noise levels. To overcome the limitations of traditional regularizers, learning-based regularizers are proposed in the recent past. This paper proposes a Learned Proximal operator for Seismic Deconvolution (LP4SD), which leverages a neural network to learn the proximal operator of a regularizer. LP4SD is trained in a loop unrolled manner and is capable of learning complicated structures from the training data. It is worth mentioning that the network is trained with synthetic data and evaluated on both synthetic and real data. LP4SD is shown to generate better reconstruction results in terms of three different metrics as compared to learning a direct inverse.