Abstract

Seismic imaging is based on numerical solutions to wave equations, which can be classified into ray-based integral and wave field based differential solutions. Kirchhoff migration is a typical ray-based imaging procedure that is efficient computationally but often fails in areas of complex geology, such as subsalt, because the wave field is distorted severely by lateral velocity variations, leading to complex multipathing. Wave field imaging works better for complex geology but is compute intensive than Kirchhoff migration. Depending on computational time constraints and available resources, different levels of approximation are applied to accelerate imaging, e.g., one way versus two way, acoustic versus elastic, isotropic versus anisotropic. In this study, a small portion of an area was chosen to do the comparative study of the three imaging methods, vis-a-vis time & quality of image outputs.