CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE WORK

Common-azimuth migration was successful in prestack depth imaging a 3-D marine data set recorded over a complex geological area. The results presented in this paper showed that common-azimuth migration is a viable method for efficient full-volume imaging of modern 3-D marine data sets. Further improvements in the migration results are expected when AMO, instead of simple binning, is used to transform the recorded data to ``effective'' common-azimuth data prior to migration.

The encouraging results from the test presented in this paper open new promising directions of investigation. Because of the potential advantages of downward continuation methods in handling multi-pathing, it would be worthwhile to develop a comparative study of the accuracy of common-azimuth migration and Kirchhoff migration in presence of multi-pathing. Further, a generalization of depth-focusing velocity analysis to 3-D marine data would yield a velocity estimation methodology that might have wide applications to the data sets for which common-azimuth migration proves to be accurate.