Curvelet-based migration preconditioning and scaling

The extremely large size of typical seismic imaging problems has been one of the major stumbling blocks for iterative techniques to attain accurate migration amplitudes. These iterative methods are important because they complement theoretical approaches that are hampered by difficulties to control problems such as finite-acquisition aperture, source-receiver frequency response, and directivity. To solve these problems, we apply preconditioning, which significantly improves convergence of least-squares migration. We discuss different levels of preconditioning that range from corrections for the order of the migration operator to corrections for spherical spreading, and position and reflector-dip dependent amplitude errors. While the first two corrections correspond to simple scalings in the Fourier and physical domain, the third correction requires phase-space (space spanned by location and dip) scaling, which we carry out with curvelets. We show that our combined preconditioner leads to a significant improvement of the convergence of least-squares ‘wave-equation’ migration on a line from the SEG AA’ salt model.