De‐blending reverse‐time migration

Reverse‐time migration (RTM), based on the full two‐way wave equation, has gained interest and become a popular imaging tool for complex structures in the last few years. The method is well‐known for its ability to better image the steeply dipping and overturned structures than the migration methods based on the one‐way wave equation extrapolation. However, the RTM image often contains low frequency and back‐scattering noise, and the imaging quality is sensitive to the migration velocity. In order to improve the RTM imaging quality and make the RTM image less sensitive to the velocity model, we developed an RTM de‐blending technique which separates upgoing and downgoing source and receiver wavefields, and then use them to construct final RTM images. Test results show that decomposed images obtained from only the downgoing source and receiver wavefields are less sensitive to velocity. It removes unwanted noise and migration artifacts from conventional RTM, and the imaging quality is greatly improved compared with a conventional RTM image