Target-oriented Gaussian beam migration using a modified ray tracing scheme

Abstract

For large-scale 3D seismic data, target-oriented reservoir imaging is more attractive than conventional full-volume migration, in terms of computation efficiency. Gaussian beam migration (GBM) is one of the most robust depth imaging method, which not only keeps the advantages of ray methods, such as high efficiency and flexibility, but also allows us to solve caustics and multipathing problems. But conventional Gaussian beam migration requires slant stack for prestack data, and ray tracing from beam center location to subsurface, which is not easy to be directly applied for target-oriented imaging. In this paper, we modify the conventional Gaussian beam migration scheme, by shooting rays from subsurface image points to receivers to implement wavefield back-propagation. This modification helps us to achieve a better subsurface illumination in complex structure and allows simple implementation for target reservoir imaging. Significantly, compared with the wavefield-based GBM, our method does not reconstruct the subsurface snapshots, which has higher efficiency. But the proposed method is not as efficient as the conventional Gaussian beam migration. Synthetic and field data examples demonstrate the validity and the target-oriented imaging capability of our method.