Multisource least-squares migration of marine streamer and land data with frequency-division encoding

Multisource migration of phase-encoded supergathers has shown great promise in reducing the computational cost of conventional migration. The accompanying crosstalk noise, in addition to the migration footprint, can be reduced by least-squares inversion. But the application of this approach to marine streamer data is hampered by the mismatch between the limited number of live traces/shot recorded in the field and the pervasive number of traces generated by the finite-difference modelling method. This leads to a strong mismatch in the misfit function and results in strong artefacts (crosstalk) in the multisource least-squares migration image. To eliminate this noise, we present a frequency-division multiplexing (FDM) strategy with iterative least-squares migration (ILSM) of supergathers. The key idea is, at each ILSM iteration, to assign a unique frequency band to each shot gather. In this case there is no overlap in the crosstalk spectrum of each migrated shot gather m(x, ω i), so the spectral crosstalk product m(x, ω i)m(x, ω j) =δ i, j is zero, unless i=j. Our results in applying this method to 2D marine data for a SEG/EAGE salt model show better resolved images than standard migration computed at about 1/10 th of the cost. Similar results are achieved after applying this method to synthetic data for a 3D SEG/EAGE salt model, except the acquisition geometry is similar to that of a marine OBS survey. Here, the speedup of this method over conventional migration is more than 10. We conclude that multisource migration for a marine geometry can be successfully achieved by a frequency-division encoding strategy, as long as crosstalk-prone sources are segregated in their spectral content. This is both the strength and the potential limitation of this method. © 2012 European Association of Geoscientists & Engineers.