Complex spectral decomposition via inversion strategies

David C. Bonar

and Mauricio D. Sacchi, University of Alberta

SUMMARY
Spectral decomposition is a time-frequency analysis tool
widely used in seismic data interpretation. Unlike conven-
tional frequency analysis, such as the Fourier transform, spec-
tral decomposition estimates the frequency content of a sig-
nal at any particular time. Thus, the frequency content is de-
ned on a local, not global, scale. An alternative method for
spectral decomposition is proposed in which the seismic signal
is deconvolved with a dictionary of different frequency com-
plex Ricker wavelets. By posing the underdetermined problem
through a mixed 2 - 1 norm cost function, greater resolution
is obtained in the time-frequency map as the frequency distri-
bution is constrained to be sparse. Examples on synthetic data
are presented to illustrate the proposed method for two differ-
ent mixed 2 - 1 norm solving algorithms.
INTRODUCTION
The frequency content of a time series, such as a seismic sig-
nal, is commonly found using the Fourier transform. However,
the frequency information obtained from this method relates to
the entire time series and contains no information about how it
varies locally. Knowledge of how the frequency content of a
signal varies in time can be signicant, as illustrated by a mu-
sical score which denotes particular frequencies (i.e. notes) to
be played at specic times. The local variations of frequency
in a signal can be acquired through time-frequency analysis,
also known as spectral decomposition, which decomposes a
one dimensional signal into a two dimensional space (i.e. time
and frequency). Resolving how the frequency content of a sig-
nal changes with time has been studied in a large range of
elds such as geophysics, quantum mechanics, engineering,
sound analysis and speech recognition, radar, and musicogra-
phy (Gardner and Magnasco, 2006).
In seismic interpretation, spectral decomposition has been em-
ployed to study aspects such as the reservoir characterization
of thin beds (Partyka et al., 1999) and the low frequency shad-
ows associated with hydrocarbons (Castagna et al., 2003). This
type of analysis has commonly been performed using short
windowdiscrete Fourier transforms (Partyka et al., 1999) where
the reectivity sequence, which represents the geological se-
quence, can no longer be considered white, or completely ran-
dom. Therefore, the spectral attributes seen in the amplitude
spectrum of the short-window Fourier transform are a com-
bination of the amplitude spectrums of the seismic wavelet
and reectivity sequence. It is this interference attribute of
the wavelet and reectivity amplitude spectra that has been ex-
ploited in earlier time-frequency analysis exercises. Various
other approaches have also been developed for time-frequency
analysis such as the continuous wavelet transform (Sinha et al.,
2005), S-transform (Stockwell et al., 1996), Wigner-Ville dis-
tribution (Wu and Liu, 2009), and matching pursuit algorithms
(Mallat and Zhang, 1993), (Chakraborty and Okaya, 1995).
The alternative proposed method takes a different approach to
the spectral decomposition problem by stating it as an inverse
problem, similar to Portniaguine and Castagna (2004). A dic-
tionary of different frequency complex Ricker wavelets is de-
convolved from the seismic trace, producing a time-frequency
map. By using an 1 norm as the regularization parameter in
this underdetermined problem, the time-frequency map is con-
strained to provide a sparser solution that has higher resolution
as seen in Figure 1. Additional information about the seismic
signal may also be acquired through the phase of the complex
time-frequency map.
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Figure 1: Synthetic trace spectrally decomposed using 2 - 2
norms and 2 - 1 norms (left to right: synthetic trace, 2 least
squares solution, IRLS solution, FISTA solution)
THEORY
Complex spectral decomposition
The convolutional model states that a seismic trace, s, is com-
posed of the convolution of a wavelet, w, with the reectivity
sequence, r, of the Earth as seen in Equation 1.
s =wr (1)
Equation 1 can also be represented as the linear system of
equations, s = Wr, where W represents the convolutional ma-
trix of the wavelet. As developed in Bonar et al. (2010), this
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Complex spectral decomposition
methodology can be expanded to study how multiple wavelets
can be represented in the seismic trace. Using a dictionary of
different Ricker wavelets that are uniquely dened by a cen-
tral frequency, the seismic trace can be decomposed into its
different frequency components at a specic time through the
employment of deconvolution. If N different frequency Ricker
wavelets comprise the Ricker wavelet dictionary, the seismic
trace can be constructed from its frequency components by
s =
`
W1 W
2
. . . W
N

0
B
B
B
@
r
0
r
1
.
.
.
r
N
1
C
C
C
A
=Dm (2)
where W
i
and r
i
refer to the wavelet convolution matrix for
the Ricker wavelet with central frequency f
i
, and its associ-
ated reectivity sequence. The matrix D represents the dictio-
nary of Ricker wavelets and, nally, m is used to represent the
vector containing all the pseudo-reectivity sequences. This
procedure can be accomplished in the Fourier domain to in-
crease computational efciency. Essentially, the seismic sig-
nal is decomposed into several traces that are uniquely deter-
mined from a singular Ricker wavelet and its related reec-
tivity structure. The time-frequency analysis can then be ob-
tained with the prior knowledge of the frequency content of
the individual Ricker wavelets. Thus, the seismic signal can
be transformed into a time-frequency map by deconvolving a
Ricker wavelet dictionary from the seismic signal to obtain a
pseudo-frequency dependent reectivity structure that can be
portrayed as a time-frequency map.
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Frequency (Hz)
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Figure 2: Comparison of using a real Ricker wavelet dictionary
(center) to a complex Ricker wavelet dictionary (amplitude of
frequency displayed) (right)


Real
Imaginary
Envelope


Real
Imaginary
Envelope
Figure 3: Complex Ricker Wavelets (Top: positive frequencies
retained; Bottom: negative frequencies retained)
The Ricker wavelets of the aforementioned dictionary can be
replaced by complex Ricker wavelets to force the time-frequency
map to be complex as well. The benets of a complex time-
frequency map are that it can display both amplitude and phase
information about the frequency content, whereas a real time-
frequency map suffers from the inuence of the polarity of
the original seismic trace. This effect is portrayed in Figure 2
where the example trace is decomposed using a real and com-
plex Ricker wavelet dictionary. However, care must be taken
when constructing the complex Ricker wavelet dictionary to
ensure full frequency coverage.
A complex Ricker wavelet is constructed by taking the Hilbert
transform of the real Ricker wavelet, which essentially takes
the Fourier transform of a signal, removes the negative fre-
quency portion, and then converts the signal back into its orig-
inal domain. If the entire complex Ricker wavelet dictionary
was constructed in this manner, negative frequency compo-
nents of the signal could not be accounted for as the dictio-
nary contains no negative frequency components. One could
also create a complex Ricker wavelet using this concept with
maintaining only negative frequencies, not positive ones. The
complex Ricker wavelet obtained from these two methods are
displayed in Figure 3 and only differ in the polarity of the
imaginary part. When summed together, the imaginary parts of
these wavelets will cancel each other. To ensure that the com-
plex Ricker wavelet dictionary contains both positive and neg-
ative frequencies, it must be constructed using pairs of com-
plex Ricker wavelets that maintain the positive or negative fre-
quencies.
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Complex spectral decomposition
Applying sparsity constraints for higher resolution
Resolution in the time-frequency map can be increased by ap-
plying an 1 norm regularization term to the inverse problem.
The 1 normpromotes a sparser solution when compared to the
2 norm. By imposing that the solution, or pseudo-frequency
reectivity structure, be sparse, a minimal amount of Ricker
wavelets will be required to represent the seismic signal. This
in turn will make the pseudo-frequency reectivity structure
and thus, the time-frequency map, have a greater resolution.
The inverse problem can then be posed by the cost function
J, as seen in Equation 3, where the 2 norm is applied to t
the data and the 1 norm is applied to promote sparsity in the
solution and is controlled by the trade-off parameter .
J = ||s Rm||
2
+||m||
1
(3)
The non-quadratic nature of the 1 norm causes the minimiza-
tion of the cost function J to become computationally more
expensive than if an 2 norm was used. The mixed 2 - 1
problem was solved using two different techniques, the iter-
atively reweighted least squares (IRLS) method (Scales and
Gersztenkorn, 1988) and the fast iterative soft thresholding al-
gorithm (FISTA) (Beck and Teboulle, 2009). The IRLS algo-
rithm solves the cost function J in a similar way that the regu-
larized least squares method solves the 2 - 2 norm problem
and can be described by the iterative nature of Equation 4,
m
k+1
=

D
T
D+Q

1
RD
T
s (4)
where the matrix Q implicitly depends upon the original model
m
k
. A conjugate gradient algorithm was employed to solve the
inversions required in this method to improve computational
efciency. The FISTA algorithm is based upon the idea of it-
eratively solving simpler cost functions that are always greater
than or equal to the original complicated cost function using
a soft-thresholding operator. This algorithm is described by
Equation 5, where is a constant that must be greater than or
equal to the maximum eigenvalue of D
T
D, and h
k
is a clever
update of the model estimate m
k
reducing computational time.
m
k+1
= sof t

h
k
+
1

D
T
(s Dh
k
),

2

(5)
The soft-thresholding operator, sof t, is dened by Equation 6
for complex numbers.
sof t

Ae
i
,

=
(
(A)e
i
if A >
0 if A .
(6)
EXAMPLES
The example trace used in Figures 1 and 2 was contaminated
with 15% noise and subsequently spectrally decomposed. As
seen in Figure 4, the recovered time-frequency map of the
FISTA solution is less prone to recover artifacts in frequency
content caused by the addition of noise for a solution recovered
with a comparable computational time from IRLS. However,
both solutions recover the frequency content of the example
trace quite favourably while exhibiting the ability to attenuate
noise.
By using a complex Ricker wavelet dictionary, the proposed
spectral decomposition method can also be applied to complex
signals as illustrated in Figure 5. For a real signal, the imag-
inary components of all of the complex Ricker wavelets used
to represent the signal must sum together to zero. This means
that the time-frequency map is symmetric about the zero fre-
quency line. When the signal contains both real and imaginary
components, this symmetry is broken as an imaginary compo-
nent needs to be modelled. Similar to the Fourier transform,
only half of the frequencies need to be displayed for real sig-
nals while all of the frequencies are required to be displayed
for complex signals. A possible application for the inclusion
of a complex signal is spectrally decomposing the vertical and
horizontal components of a seismogram together.
CONCLUSION
An inversion method incorporating complex Ricker wavelets
was proposed for the spectral decomposition problem. The
inclusion of complex wavelets removed seismic amplitude po-
larity effects on the time-frequency map witnessed when the
method was applied with real wavelets. Sparsity constraints
were imposed to increase the resolution of the time-frequency
map and applied using the IRLS and FISTA algorithms, pro-
ducing similar results. The sparsity promoting algorithms were
also able to adequately acquire the frequency content of signals
contaminated with random noise and provide a possible tool
for noise attenuation. By generalizing the proposed spectral
decomposition method to include complex wavelets, signals
of both a real and complex nature are able to be modelled.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We would like to thank NSERC for funding this research as
well as the members of SAIG (Signal Analysis and Imaging
Group) at the University of Alberta for their continued support.
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Complex spectral decomposition
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Figure 4: Results of complex spectral decomposition on a
noisy signal (top row left to right: noisy signal, IRLS solu-
tion, FISTA solution; bottom row left to right: noiseless signal,
IRLS reconstructed signal, FISTA reconstructed signal)
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Real
Imaginary
Frequency (Hz)
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Figure 5: Comparison of complex spectral decomposition for a
real and complex trace (from left to right: real trace, IRLS so-
lution, FISTA solution, complex trace, IRLS solution, FISTA
solution).
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EDITED REFERENCES
Note: This reference list is a copy-edited version of the reference list submitted by the author. Reference lists for the 2010
SEG Technical Program Expanded Abstracts have been copy edited so that references provided with the online metadata for
each paper will achieve a high degree of linking to cited sources that appear on the Web.

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