Imaging with multiples in shallow water

Based on the latest developments of research in inversion technology with optimization, researchers have made significant progress in the implementation of least-squares reverse-time migration (LS-RTM) of primaries. In Marine data however, these applications rely on the success of a pre-imaging separation of primaries and multiples, which can be modeled as a multi-dimensional convolution between the vertical derivative of the surface-free Green’s function and the down-going receiver wavefield. Instead of imaging the primaries and multiples separately, we implement the LS-RTM of the total down-going wavefield by combining areal source injection and linearized Born modelling, where strong surface related multiples are generated from a strong density variation at the ocean bottom. The advantage including surface related multiples in LS-RTM is the extra illumination we obtain from these multiples without incurring additional computational costs related to carrying out multi-dimensional convolutions part of conventional multiple prediction procedures. Even though we are able to avert these computational costs, our approach shares the large costs of LS-RTM. We reduce these costs by combining randomized source subsampling with our sparsity-promoting imaging technology, which produces artifact-free, high-resolution images, with the surface-related multiples migrated properly.

https://slim.gatech.edu/Publications/Public/Conferences/SINBAD/2017/Fall...