Principle of Reverse Time Migration
, by Stewart A. Levin
At the Migration Research Workship of the 52nd SEG meeting in Dallas
(1982), attendees were made privy to an elegant method of wave-equation
migration, known as reverse-time migration, presented by Dan Whitmore of
Amoc. Showthly thereafter, McMechan (1982, 1983) published a virtually
identical algoriwth under the tag "boundary value migration". This, along
with closely related work by Baysal, Sherwood, and Kosloff (1983a,b) done
independently at the University of Houston's Seismic Acoustic Laboratory,
has sparked much discussion.
In the May 1983 issue of Geophysics, Loewenthal and Miftu published quite
a lengthy short note detailing a migration algorithm they developed as
early as 1977 also referred to as "reversed time migration"
This last algorithm is quite different from any of the former and this
difference has created confusion as to how reverse-time migration should
be properly viewed.
In this short note, which have submitted to Geophysics, I endeavor to exaplin
the priciple of reverse-time migration and how it is applied in practice in
the above algorithms.
STANFORD