A comparison of imaging conditions for wave-equation shot-profile migration

Abstract

Abstract The application of a deconvolution imaging condition in wave-equation shot-profile migration is important to provide illumination compensation and amplitude recovery. Particularly if the aim is to successfully recover a measure of the medium reflectivity, an imaging condition that destroys amplitudes is unacceptable. We study a set of imaging conditions with illumination compensation. The imaging conditions are evaluated by the quality of the output amplitudes and artifacts produced. In numerical experiments using a vertically inhomogeneous velocity model, the best of all imaging conditions we tested is the one that divides the crosscorrelation of upgoing and downgoing wavefields by the autocorrelation of the downgoing wavefield, also known as the illumination map. In an application to Marmousi data, unconditional division by autocorrelation turned out to be unstable. Effective stabilization was achieved by smoothing the illumination map.