HEVC-based compression of high bit-depth 3D seismic data

Abstract

© 2017 IEEE. In a previous work [1] we applied the idea of HEVC intra coding to compression of 32 b/p seismic images. Results are significantly better than those from a licensed commercial wavelet-based codec that is currently used at Shell for seismic image compression, which performs on par with JPEGXR. Building upon [1], this paper exploits HEVC-based inter predictive coding for 3D 32 b/p seismic data. We propose a new model for the Lagrange multiplier in R-D optimization to accommodate 32 b/p bit-depth and extended quantization parameter range. We also focus on reducing the complexity of motion estimation to meet application needs. Experiments with our new codec show a 95% complexity reduction of encoding time at 10:1 compression ratio with only 1 dB loss on average PSNR. The compression performance and subjective quality of our codec received high evaluation marks from Shell geologists.