System and method for seismic survey design

Abstract

A system and method for designing a seismic survey including selecting a seismic survey grid as a basis for a seismic survey design and looping through the steps of generating off-the-grid locations by imposing spatial or temporal constraints on on-the-grid locations, mapping the off-the-grid locations from a physical domain to a pre-selected domain by applying a multidimensional transform to the off-the-grid locations, mapping the pre-selected domain to a rank-revealing domain using a pre-selected operator, applying a pre-selected process to minimize a rank of the off-the-grid locations in the pre-selected domain, and updating the seismic survey design based on which of the off-the-grid locations has the minimum rank until a pre-selected threshold is met indicating an optimal seismic survey design. The system and method include acquiring seismic data using the optimal seismic survey design, and enabling performing a wellsite action based at least on the seismic data.