Reverse-time migration amplitude recovery with curvelets

We recover the amplitude of a seismic image by approximating the normal (demigration-migration) operator. In this approximation, we make use of the property that curvelets remain invariant under the action of the normal operator. We propose a seismic amplitude recovery method that employs an eigenvalue like decomposition for the normal operator using curvelets as eigenvectors. Subsequently, we propose an approximate nonlinear singularity-preserving solution to the least-squares seismic imaging problem with sparseness in the curvelet domain and spatial continuity constraints. Our method is tested with a reverse-time ’wave-equation’ migration code simulating the acoustic wave equation.