Patent ID: 8775143

Claim:
A computer-implemented method for simultaneous inversion of measured geophysical data from multiple encoded sources to determine a physical properties model for a subsurface region, the measured geophysical data resulting from a survey for which a fixed-receiver assumption of simultaneous encoded-source inversion may not be valid, said method comprising: using a computer, performing a simultaneous model-simulation of a multiple encoded-source gather of data, or generating an encoded data residual computed from a simultaneous model-simulation of a multiple encoded-source gather of data, then performing simultaneous-source separation, based on the source encoding, to lessen any effect of the measured geophysical data's not satisfying the fixed-receiver assumption, wherein a data processing step coming after the simultaneous-source separation acts to conform the separated model-simulated data to the measured geophysical data for source and receiver combinations that are missing in the measured geophysical data due to failure of the fixed-receiver assumption.