From blind source separation to seismic signal processing

• Grant number: 15/11462-0
• Support Opportunities: Research Grants - Visiting Researcher Grant - International
• Start date: September 01, 2015
• End date: August 31, 2016
• Field of knowledge: Engineering - Electrical Engineering - Telecommunications
• Principal Investigator: João Marcos Travassos Romano
• Grantee: João Marcos Travassos Romano
• Visiting researcher: Daniela Donno
• Visiting researcher institution: ParisTech, France
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Engenharia Elétrica e de Computação (FEEC). Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Campinas , SP, Brazil

Abstract

Prof. Daniela Donno is world-leading expert in the use of advanced signal processing techniques for processing geophysical and seismic signals, an area in which our research group has been greatly interested in the past years. The goal of geophysical signal processing is to estimate the properties of the Earth's subsurface, based on measurements acquired by sensors located over the area to be analyzed. The provided information is crucial for finding oil and gas traps, for instance. Signal processing plays a fundamental role in geophysics. Indeed, to extract relevant information from seismic data, one has to perform tasks such as filtering, deconvolution, and signal separation. Initially, there was a close interaction between the signal processing and geophysics communities; but the communities slowly drifted apart. Nowadays, there have been several attempts to revive collaborations between these communities, thanks to special sessions on geophysical signal processing in international conferences (IEEE CAMSAP 2013, IEEE ICASSP 2014), and special issues in journals (IEEE Signal Processing Magazine in 2012 and Geophysics in 2015). It should be noted that the special session at the IEEE ICASSP 2014 was organized by Prof. Donno and professors of our lab at UNICAMP (Prof. João Marcos Romano, Prof. Leonardo T. Duarte and Prof. Renato Lopes). The visit of Prof. Donno fits the context of this rapprochement. The research group of Prof. João Marcos Romano has a rising interest for applications of signal processing techniques to solve geophysical problems. Indeed, Prof. Romano, who possesses a strong expertise in unsupervised methods for signal separation and deconvolution, has recently published an article applying these techniques to the processing of seismic signals [Takahata et al., 2012]. After that, other works applying advanced signal processing techniques to seismic signals have followed. On the other side, Prof. Donno has a long experience in seismic signal processing, with several contributions in high-level geophysics journals. Her research interests are in the separation and filtering of coherent seismic noises and in seismic imaging. In particular, she is interested in blind source separation techniques, optimization techniques promoting sparsity, wavelet and curvelet transforms, high-resolution techniques commonly used in the processing of antenna arrays.This research project is intended to deepen a three-year cooperation between Prof. Romano and Prof. Donno. It should be stressed that the skills and expertises of Prof. Romano and Prof. Donno are very complementary; therefore, this collaboration has quickly become very fruitful for them. Among the results of this cooperation, we cite: -Yves-Marie Batany is currently conducting a double-degree PhD between MINES ParisTech and UNICAMP, co-supervised by Professors Romano and Donno. A journal paper with interesting results issued from the PhD research work has been submitted to Geophysics. It is co-authored by Prof. Romano and Prof. Donno. -A special session on "Seismic signal processing" has been organized at the international conference IEEE ICASSP 2014. The special session has been selected among others proposal (with acceptance rate around 50 percent), and a review article has been published. -A 50-day visit of Prof. Donno to UNICAMP in 2014, sponsored by the "Cátedras Francesas no Estado de São Paulo" program. The visit allowed the transfer of expertise between Prof. Donno and the DSPCom lab and the definition of a research working plan for future collaborations.Besides working with the several researchers of our group, Prof. Donno intends to collaborate with the research group of Prof. Denis José Schiozer from UNICAMP on signal processing and reservoir engineering. This could offer interesting new common research opportunities in related fields for both Prof. Donno and DSPCom. (AU)