An idea that has been in the back of my mind for many years is a method to compress a seismic record down to a size that it can realistically be shared by email or FTP. And I wanted to preserve all the header information, so did not want a converter, but a compressor.
The very nature of the data means that utilities like Zip and TAR do not achieve a great enough level of compression. My method can achieve quite high levels of compression (75% or more depending on parameters), while preserving headers. But it is not lossless.
For QC purposes though, it is certainly good enough, perhaps making remote QC viable. Under some conditions, it may even be usable for processing.
So far I have it working for most of the modern Sercel systems – SN408, 428, 508, SEAL, Unite, WTU and WTU3. Also for Innoseis and SmartSolo (but only for older data sets I have, if the formats have changed, I will have some more work to do). It will also work on SEGY, but typically a lower level of compression.
It is very easy to use. It consists of two applications – a Compressor which would be at the field end and a Decompressor for the Office end. Simply specify an input and an output folder and click start.
Here an example of a 98MB production shot compressed down to 8MB and then decompressed. (Only 1 line displayed of course)
Original File

Restored File after 91% compression
Here a log of some test data. The compression ratio varies depending on the data itself and the compression parameters specified. It can be optimised for each operation to achieve a suitable level of compression.

It is early days yet and needs a lot more testing under true production conditions. So it probably won’t go much further until I get some work.