3D fast illumination analysis for arbitrary acquisition system using plane waves

Abstract

We develop a new efficient scheme of illumination analysis for arbitrary acquisition system using plane waves. With this scheme, we can calculate the total illumination efficiently which considers the distribution of source and receivers. Therefore, it can be a useful tool to study the influence of the model (e.g. salt body) and the acquisition system (e.g. shot distribution and aperture size). This can be used for acquisition design and model building. In the past, to calculate illumination for a given source and receiver distribution, we have used Green's function for every subsurface location. For efficiency, we can reduce the computational cost by calculating Green's function sparsely. Consequently, the shallow part of the illumination map may include footprints from this approach. Here, we proposed a new method using plane waves instead of calculating the single point Green's function for the receiver side. Our simulation includes a number of plane waves with different takeoff angles from all the receiver locations for each shot. This routine, coupled with source-side illumination, properly calculates the illumination for a given acquisition system. Furthermore, this method out performs previous techniques for all types of illumination analysis, including large scale 3D input. Our demonstration includes a 2D Kepler salt model dataset to confirm the validity of our method, and then progresses to a 3D Freedom/Patriot model with an orthogonal shooting application.