Patent Document ID: 8868391
Application ID: 13375973
Patent Flag: 1

Claim One:
1. A process for characterising evolution of a reservoir over a time lapse by analyzing changes of seismic data wherein n surveys of the reservoir exist, where n>2, each survey of the n surveys having been taken at a different time within said time lapse and comprising a set of seismic traces, the process comprising: inverting, via a computer, one or more seismic traces for each of the set of seismic traces from multiple survey pairs taken from the n surveys to obtain an estimate of the changes having occurred in the time lapsed between surveys of each survey pair, said inversion being performed by minimising an ill-posed function which includes at least one regularisation term to impose constraints on inverted parameters, the regularization term comprising a regularization weight; repeating, via a computer, the inverting for a plurality of regularisation weights; determining, via a computer, mismatches of terms of the ill-posed function in terms of a regularisation weight of the plurality of regularisation weights; and using the determined mismatches to determine an optimal regularisation weight for the at least one regularisation term that represents a best compromise between modelling the changes and imposing the constraints.