Sparsity-promoting migration from surface-related multiples

Seismic imaging typically begins with the removal of multiple energy in the data, out of fear that it may introduce erroneous structure. However, seismic multiples have effectively seen more of the earth’s structure, and if treated correctly can potential supply more information to a seismic image compared to primaries. Past approaches to accomplish this leave ample room for improvement; they either require extensive modification to standard migration techniques, rely too much on prior information, require extensive pre-processing, or resort to full-waveform inversion. We take some valuable lessons from these efforts and present a new approach balanced in terms of ease of implementation, robustness, efficiency and well-posedness, involving a sparsity-promoting inversion procedure using standard Born migration and a data-driven multiple modeling approach based on the focal transform.