Multidimensional imaging condition for shot profile migration

Alejandro A. Valenciano, Biondo Biondi, and Antoine Guitton

valencia@sep.stanford, biondo@sep.stanford.edu, antoine@sep.stanford.edu

ABSTRACT

Conventional shot profile migration schemes determine the reflection strength at each subsurface point taking into account only the downgoing and the upgoing wavefields at that location. Since events in the subsurface are not uncorrelated, a better imaging condition could be one that makes use of the downgoing and upgoing wavefields in a neighborhood of the point where the reflection strength is calculated. A generalized multidimensional deconvolution imaging condition could be the solution to integrating information from the neighboring points, but issues related with deconvolution stability still need to be solved. An alternative to deconvolution may be a new regularized least squares imaging condition. This could be a feasible approach since the regularization operator can favor a predetermined distribution of the reflectivity. Improvements can be done in the conventional industry imaging condition adding a spatially variant damping factor, even without including information of the neighboring points.