Vector-based elastic reverse time migration based on scalar imaging condition

Geophysics ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 82 (2) ◽  
pp. S111-S127 ◽  
Author(s):  
Qizhen Du ◽  
ChengFeng Guo ◽  
Qiang Zhao ◽  
Xufei Gong ◽  
Chengxiang Wang ◽  
...  

The scalar images (PP, PS, SP, and SS) of elastic reverse time migration (ERTM) can be generated by applying an imaging condition as crosscorrelation of pure wave modes. In conventional ERTM, Helmholtz decomposition is commonly applied in wavefield separation, which leads to a polarity reversal problem in converted-wave images because of the opposite polarity distributions of the S-wavefields. Polarity reversal of the converted-wave image will cause destructive interference when stacking over multiple shots. Besides, in the 3D case, the curl calculation generates a vector S-wave, which makes it impossible to produce scalar PS, SP, and SS images with the crosscorrelation imaging condition. We evaluate a vector-based ERTM (VB-ERTM) method to address these problems. In VB-ERTM, an amplitude-preserved wavefield separation method based on decoupled elastic wave equation is exploited to obtain the pure wave modes. The output separated wavefields are both vectorial. To obtain the scalar images, the scalar imaging condition in which the scalar product of two vector wavefields with source-normalized illumination is exploited to produce scalar images instead of correlating Cartesian components or magnitude of the vector P- and S-wave modes. Compared with alternative methods for correcting the polarity reversal of PS and SP images, our ERTM solution is more stable and simple. Besides these four scalar images, the VB-ERTM method generates another PP-mode image by using the auxiliary stress wavefields. Several 2D and 3D numerical examples are evaluated to demonstrate the potential of our ERTM method.

Geophysics ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 84 (2) ◽  
pp. S95-S111 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wei Zhang ◽  
Ying Shi

Elastic reverse time migration (RTM) has the ability to retrieve accurately migrated images of complex subsurface structures by imaging the multicomponent seismic data. However, the imaging condition applied in elastic RTM significantly influences the quality of the migrated images. We evaluated three kinds of imaging conditions in elastic RTM. The first kind of imaging condition involves the crosscorrelation between the Cartesian components of the particle-velocity wavefields to yield migrated images of subsurface structures. An alternative crosscorrelation imaging condition between the separated pure wave modes obtained by a Helmholtz-like decomposition method could produce reflectivity images with explicit physical meaning and fewer crosstalk artifacts. A drawback of this approach, though, was that the polarity reversal of the separated S-wave could cause destructive interference in the converted-wave image after stacking over multiple shots. Unlike the conventional decomposition method, the elastic wavefields can also be decomposed in the vector domain using the decoupled elastic wave equation, which preserves the amplitude and phase information of the original elastic wavefields. We have developed an inner-product imaging condition to match the vector-separated P- and S-wave modes to obtain scalar reflectivity images of the subsurface. Moreover, an auxiliary P-wave stress image can supplement the elastic imaging. Using synthetic examples with a layered model, the Marmousi 2 model, and a fault model, we determined that the inner-product imaging condition has prominent advantages over the other two imaging conditions and generates images with preserved amplitude and phase attributes.


Geophysics ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 81 (5) ◽  
pp. S383-S398 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chenlong Wang ◽  
Jiubing Cheng ◽  
Børge Arntsen

Recording P- and S-wave modes acquires more information related to rock properties of the earth’s interior. Elastic migration, as a part of multicomponent seismic data processing, potentially offers a great improvement over conventional acoustic migration to create a spatial image of some medium properties. In the framework of elastic reverse time migration, we have developed new scalar and vector imaging conditions assisted by efficient polarization-based mode decoupling to avoid crosstalk among the different wave modes for isotropic and transversely isotropic media. For the scalar imaging, we corrected polarity reversal of zero-lag PS images using the local angular attributes on the fly of angle-domain imaging. For the vector imaging, we naturally used the polarization information in the decoupled single-mode vector fields to automatically avoid the polarity reversal and to estimate the local angular attributes for angle-domain imaging. Examples of increasing complexity in 2D and 3D cases found that the proposed approaches can be used to obtain a physically interpretable image and angle-domain common-image gather at an acceptable computational cost. Decoupling and imaging the 3D S-waves involves some complexity, which has not been addressed in the literature. For this reason, we also attempted at illustrating the physical contents of the two separated S-wave modes and their contribution to seismic full-wave imaging.


2017 ◽  
Vol 48 (3) ◽  
pp. 201-209 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hyungwook Choi ◽  
Soon Jee Seol ◽  
Joongmoo Byun

Geophysics ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 83 (6) ◽  
pp. S489-S503 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jidong Yang ◽  
Hejun Zhu ◽  
Wenlong Wang ◽  
Yang Zhao ◽  
Houzhu Zhang

In elastic reverse time migration (RTM), wavefield separation is an important step to remove crosstalk artifacts and improve imaging quality. State-of-the-art techniques for wavefield separation in isotropic elastic media include using the Helmholtz decomposition and introducing an auxiliary wave equation. Although these two approaches produce pure-mode vector wavefields with correct amplitudes, phases, and physical units, their computational costs are still high under current computational capability, especially for 3D large-scale problems. Based on the P- and S-wave dispersion relations, we have developed an efficient wavefield separation strategy for elastic RTM. Instead of solving a vector Poisson’s equation in the Helmholtz decomposition, we modify the phases of source wavelet as well as multicomponent records and scale the amplitudes of extrapolated wavefields with the squares of P- and S-wave velocities. This operation allows us to produce vector P- and S-wavefields with the same phases and amplitudes as the input coupled wavefields while significantly reducing computational costs. With the separated vector wavefields, we implemented a modified dot-product imaging condition for elastic RTM. In comparison with the previously proposed dot-product imaging condition, this modified imaging condition enables us to eliminate the effects of multiplication with a cosine function and hence produces migrated images with accurate amplitudes. Several 2D and 3D numerical examples are used to demonstrate the feasibility and robustness of our method for imaging complex subsurface structures.


Geophysics ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 83 (6) ◽  
pp. S569-S577 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yang Zhao ◽  
Houzhu Zhang ◽  
Jidong Yang ◽  
Tong Fei

Using the two-way elastic-wave equation, elastic reverse time migration (ERTM) is superior to acoustic RTM because ERTM can handle mode conversions and S-wave propagations in complex realistic subsurface. However, ERTM results may not only contain classical backscattering noises, but they may also suffer from false images associated with primary P- and S-wave reflections along their nonphysical paths. These false images are produced by specific wave paths in migration velocity models in the presence of sharp interfaces or strong velocity contrasts. We have addressed these issues explicitly by introducing a primary noise removal strategy into ERTM, in which the up- and downgoing waves are efficiently separated from the pure-mode vector P- and S-wavefields during source- and receiver-side wavefield extrapolation. Specifically, we investigate a new method of vector wavefield decomposition, which allows us to produce the same phases and amplitudes for the separated P- and S-wavefields as those of the input elastic wavefields. A complex function involved with the Hilbert transform is used in up- and downgoing wavefield decomposition. Our approach is cost effective and avoids the large storage of wavefield snapshots that is required by the conventional wavefield separation technique. A modified dot-product imaging condition is proposed to produce multicomponent PP-, PS-, SP-, and SS-images. We apply our imaging condition to two synthetic models, and we demonstrate the improvement on the image quality of ERTM.


2016 ◽  
Vol 127 ◽  
pp. 56-67 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zhiyuan Li ◽  
Xiaona Ma ◽  
Chao Fu ◽  
Guanghe Liang

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
Author(s):  
Qizhen Du ◽  
Xiaoyu Zhang ◽  
Shukui Zhang ◽  
Fuyuan Zhang ◽  
Li-Yun Fu

The scalar images (PP and PS) can be effectively obtained in vector-based elastic reverse time migration by applying dot product–based scalar imaging conditions to the separated vector wavefields. However, the PP image suffers from polarity reversal issues when opening angles are greater than 90∘ and backscattering artifacts when opening angles are close to 180∘. To address these issues, we propose the pseudo-Laplace filter for the dot product–based scalar imaging condition. Based on the analysis of the Laplace filter in the scalar image of vector-based wavefields, the second-order parallel-oriented partial derivatives of Cartesian components cross-correlation results are selected to construct the pseudo-Laplace filter. In contrast, second-order normal-oriented partial derivatives of the Cartesian component’s cross-correlation results are omitted. The theoretical analysis with the plane wave assumption shows that the proposed pseudo-Laplace filter can solve the problems of backscattering artifacts and polarity reversal in PP images by the scalar imaging condition. Due to additional polarity correction and backscattering attenuation, numerical examples show excellent performance in PP images with a pseudo-Laplace filter. Furthermore, the application of the pseudo-Laplace filter requires trivial additional computation or storage.


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