3D plane-wave least-squares Kirchhoff migration

A three dimensional least-squares Kirchhoff migration (LSM) is developed in the prestack plane-wave domain to increase the quality of migration images and the computational efficiency. Due to the limitation of current 3D marine acquisition geometries, a cylindrical-wave encoding is adopted for the narrow azimuth streamer data. To account for the mispositioning of reflectors due to errors in the velocity model, a regularized LSM is devised so that each plane-wave or cylindrical-wave gather gives rise to an individual migration image, and a regularization term is included to encourage the similarities between the migration images of similar encoding schemes. Both synthetic and field results show that: 1) plane-wave or cylindrical-wave encoding LSM can achieve both computational and IO saving, compared to shot-domain LSM, however, plane-wave LSM is still about 5 times more expensive than plane-wave migration; 2) the regularized LSM is more robust compared to LSM with one reflectivity model common for all the plane-wave or cylindrical-wave gathers.