Trace‐imposed stretch correction in Kirchhoff prestack time migration

Abstract

ABSTRACTKirchhoff prestack time migration, which works trace‐by‐trace, remains appealing to academia and industry due to its robustness and efficiency. However, like the other prestack migration methods, Kirchhoff prestack time migration also suffers from the angle‐dependent stretching effect, which narrows the amplitude spectra of seismic data. This effect gets more severe as the incident angle increases. In this paper, we propose a novel approach, which attaches a prediction shaping filter to the Kirchhoff prestack time migration, to mitigate the stretching effect. Our approach takes advantage on the trace‐by‐trace implementation of the prestack time migration algorithm, without the output of the angle‐domain common‐imaging gather. Also, our method can cascade with Q‐compensation in prestack time migration. We demonstrate our method with both a numerical example and a field data example.