The PS-AMO operator that we used had the advantage of not demanding data in the CRP domain. This operator, as a cascade operation of PS-DMO and its inverse, internally performs the CMP to CRP lateral-shift correction, since the PS-DMO operator does it as well. Therefore, a priori CRP binning was not necessary before applying azimuth moveout to converted-wave data. The PS-AMO operator had two main characteristics: 1) it preserved the resolution of the dipping events, and 2) it corrected for the spatial lateral shift of the common reflection point.
PS-AMO has several applications. In this work, we tested the operator for the problem of irregular geometries; more specifically the converted-wave portion of OBS seismic data. In this case, the geometry-regularization problem was handled in the least-squares sense.
The real data results show that the method proposed in this paper, that is, the PS-AMO geometry regularization followed by PS common-azimuth migration (PS-AMORe), produces results significantly better than the traditional process (PS-NoMoRe).
The PS-AMORe method enhances the main events in the final image, improves the continuity of the reflectors and recovers geological features that are lost with the traditional method (PS-NoMoRe).