Imaging under salt remains a problem for the oil industry Muerdter et al. (1996); Prucha et al. (1998) due to illumination problems and poor velocity resolution under the salt body. Residual Stolt migration is a proved technique for updating the image and the velocity field Sava (1999), because of that we believe that an asymmetric residual migration operator can help in updating the image just below the salt body.
Rosales et al. (2001) introduced Stolt residual migration for converted waves. The new operator has the property of correcting the source-reflector and reflector-receiver leg independently. This property can be extended for imaging complex single mode (PP) data (e.g. under salt imaging).
We start with a review of the theory already discussed by Rosales et al. (2001) in order to handle separately the source and receiver legs in single mode data. We present a potential frame for imaging update under salt edges, as well as future plans on this area.