Robust optimal synthetic aperture imaging of towed streamer electromagnetic data

Abstract

The synthetic aperture (SA) method has recently found applications in analysis of the low frequency marine controlled source electromagnetic data. It has been shown in numbers of publications that SA method can enhance the response from an anomalous target. However, the SA method may not only 'steer' the EM field in the area of interest, but also steer the noise, thus unreasonably amplifying the noise level. In addition, the current realizations of the SA method are themselves very sensitive to the noise in the data and to the parameters of the synthetic aperture. To overcome these difficulties, we have developed a robust SA method. The synthetic model study presented here shows that this method is stable with respect to noise and has a relatively high spatial resolution.