Prestack seismic data interpolation and enhancement with common‐reflection‐surface–based migration and demigration

The standard common‐reflection‐surface stacking method simulates high‐quality zero‐offset stacked data from multi‐coverage prestack data and, as by‐products, provides three kinematic wavefield attributes in two dimensions that can be applied to solve reflection seismic problems. One of the most significant applications of those attributes is for interpolation and enhancement of prestack data through the partial common‐reflection‐surface stack approach. Because this interpolation method is based on the stacking process, it usually introduces spurious noises that can create artefacts in the migration results. In order to overcome these limitations, a new prestack data interpolation and enhancement method is presented by applying the attributes and the common‐reflection‐surface operator based on two fundamental seismic imaging operations: the Kirchhoff‐type time migration and demigration. The diffraction curves required to apply these two fundamental operations are particular cases of the common‐reflection‐surface stack operator, which better fits the diffraction events and, consequently, is the best approximation for the Kirchhoff migration operator. From synthetic and real data, impulse responses of the migration and demigration operations are shown to demonstrate how this new approach regularizes and interpolates prestack data. A simple synthetic example shows good accuracy for reconstructed reflection events and well‐resolved conflicting dip events. The application example in real data reveals that the proposed approach provides cleaner regularized sections with better reconstructed events than the results of the well‐known partial common‐reflection‐surface stack approach. It has been successfully shown that the proposed approach is a well‐founded alternative for interpolation and denoising of seismic data and produces better preconditioned data for prestack migration.