Velocity analysis based on minimum entropy

Seismic resolution is determined by the sparsity of reflection events together with the dispersion of the wavelets representing those events. In this paper, minimum entropy (ME) norms are introduced as a measure of spatial resolving power. It is shown that the lateral dispersion of inverted diffractor responses (inverted spatial wavelets) increases with increasing velocity error. Using this property, minimum entropy velocity analysis (MEVA) is proposed to extract velocity information from diffraction energy. MEVA can be successfully applied to zero-offset (including poststack) data and common-offset data with a sufficient amount of diffraction energy. In addition, MEVA can be used as an alternative to existing CMP velocity estimation techniques.