Reconstruction of the near‐offset gap in marine seismic data using seismic interferometric interpolation

In conventional seismic exploration, especially in marine seismic exploration, shot gathers with missing near‐offset traces are common. Interferometric interpolation methods are one of a range of different methods that have been developed to solve this problem. Interferometric interpolation methods differ from conventional interpolation methods as they utilise information from multiples in the interpolation process. In this study, we apply both conventional interferometric interpolation (shot domain) and multi‐domain interferometric interpolation (shot and receiver domain) to a synthetic and a real‐towed marine dataset from the Baltic Sea with the primary aim of improving the image of the seabed by extrapolation of a near‐offset gap. We utilise a matching filter after interferometric interpolation to partially mitigate artefacts and coherent noise associated with the far‐field approximation and a limited recording aperture size. The results show that an improved image of the seabed is obtained after performing interferometric interpolation. In most cases, the results from multi‐domain interferometric interpolation are similar to those from conventional interferometric interpolation. However, when the source–receiver aperture is limited, the multi‐domain method performs better. A quantitative analysis for assessing the performance of interferometric interpolation shows that multi‐domain interferometric interpolation typically performs better than conventional interferometric interpolation. We also benchmark the interpolated results generated by interferometric interpolation against those obtained using sparse recovery interpolation.