Cascaded deconvolution filters

Laurence R. Lines, Sven Treitel

There are few seismic wavelets that have an exact inverse filter for deconvolution, but one of these is an exponentially damped sinusoid. As shown by Lines and Treitel (1983) this wavelet has an exact 3-term inverse. Unlike most seismic wavelets, a Wiener deconvolution filter can be designed that shapes this wavelet to an output that is a nearly perfect spike. For the majority of seismic wavelets where a perfect spike is not achievable, one can shape the actual wavelet to an exponentially damped sinusoid prior to and then apply a Wiener filter that will spike the exponentially damped wavelet. This appears to hold some promise, as shown by a computational example.