The Stanford Exploration Project (SEP) is an industry-funded academic consortium whose purpose is to improve the theory and practice of constructing 3-D and 4-D images of the earth from seismic echo soundings.
SEP pioneered innovations in migration imaging, velocity estimation, dip moveout and slant stack. Today our focus is on 3-D seismic applications such as velocity estimation, wavefield-continuation prestack migration, multidimensional image estimation, and 4-D (time-lapse) reservoir monitoring. Besides 3-D reflection seismic data, we undertake small 2-D imaging projects with geophysical data of all kinds. The diversity of applications exercises our judgment and skill at combining fundamentals of statistical signal theory, optimization theory, numerical analysis, and wave propagation theory, and this has led us to numerous improvements and some breakthroughs.
