Linear predictive coding of marine seismic data

This paper examines the utility of linear predictive coding in reducing the amount of data storage required for signals gathered in ocean bottom seismology. In this study, a set of 12 typical signals were repeatedly encoded with the storage allocated decreasing from an initial 12 bits per datum to 2. The error introduced was then compared to the performance achieved by simply rounding off the lowest bits of the data, and to estimates of the rate distortion limit. It was found that this scheme consistently introduced about 15 times (4 bits) less distortion both in terms of the root-mean-square (rms) error and in terms of the maximum error than rounding the data. Moreover, the rms distortion of the data were within a factor of 4 (2 bits) of the rate distortion bound on optimal encoding. Thus, the scheme was seen to be an effective approach to the problem of data compression in the marine environment.