Joint multi-mode dispersion extraction in Fourier and space time domains

Abstract: In this paper we present a novel broadband approach for the extraction of dispersion curves of multiple time frequency overlapped dispersive modes such as in borehole acoustic data. The new approach works jointly in the Fourier and space time domains and, in contrast to existing space time approaches that mainly work for time frequency separated signals, efficiently handles multiple signals with significant time frequency overlap. The proposed method begins by exploiting the slowness (phase and group) and time location estimates based on frequency-wavenumber (f-k) domain sparsity penalized broadband dispersion extraction method as presented in \cite{AeronTSP2011}. In this context we first present a Cramer Rao Bound (CRB) analysis for slowness estimation in the (f-k) domain and show that for the f-k domain broadband processing, group slowness estimates have more variance than the phase slowness estimates and time location estimates. In order to improve the group slowness estimates we exploit the time compactness property of the modes to effectively represent the data as a linear superposition of time compact space time propagators parameterized by the phase and group slowness. A linear least squares estimation algorithm in the space time domain is then used to obtain improved group slowness estimates. The performance of the method is demonstrated on real borehole acoustic data sets.