We propose an efficient iterative data interpolation method using continuity along reflectors in seismic images via curvelet and discrete cosine transforms. The curvelet transform is a new multiscale transform that provides sparse representations for images that comprise smooth objects separated by piece-wise smooth discontinuities (e.g. seismic images). The advantage of using curvelets is that these frames are sparse for high-frequency caustic-free solutions of the wave-equation. Since we are dealing with less than ideal data (e.g. bandwidth-limited), we compliment the curvelet frames with the discrete cosine transform. The latter is motivated by the successful data continuation with the discrete Fourier transform. By choosing generic basis functions we circumvent the necessity to make parametric assumptions (e.g. through linear/parabolic Radon or demigration) regarding the shape of events in seismic data. Synthetic and real data examples demonstrate that our algorithm provides interpolated traces that accurately reproduce the wavelet shape as well as the AVO behavior along events in shot gathers.

We propose a method for seismic data interpolation based on 1) the reformulation of the problem as a stable signal recovery problem and 2) the fact that seismic data is sparsely represented by curvelets. This method does not require information on the seismic velocities. Most importantly, this formulation potentially leads to an explicit recovery condition. We also propose a large-scale problem solver for the l1-regularization minimization involved in the recovery and successfully illustrate the performance of our algorithm on 2D synthetic and real examples.