Seismic Blending and Deblending in 3D

We propose a new acquisition design based on blended crossline sources. In contrast to existing blended-acquisition designs that only blend in 2D (inline direction and time), this design blends sources in 3D (inline direction, crossline direction and time). Blended crossline sources allow to increase the data quality and/or to reduce the acquisition costs. While most blended-acquisition designs blend two sources, the proposed acquisition design blends up to seven sources. In order to realize this increase in number of blended sources without degrading the data quality, we introduce a 3D deblending method that exploits both the crossline and inline direction to deblend sources. The feasibility of the proposed method is demonstrated on a complex synthetic data example with good results.