2D least-squares elastic reverse time migration of multicomponent seismic data

Elastic reverse time migration (ERTM) is a state-of-the-art imaging technique used for determining complicated subsurface structures. However, the migrated images often suffer from low spatial resolution, low signal-to-noise ratio (S/N), and unbalanced amplitudes because the theoretical hypothesis of ERTM cannot be satisfied in practice. Although elastic least-squares reverse time migration (ELSRTM) has been proposed to address the issues of ERTM, the resulting images are generally represented by parameter perturbations such as P- and S-velocity perturbations, which have the different physical meanings from the ERTM images. To produce improved ERTM images, we used a least-squares RTM method for elastic data in isotropic media by applying least-squares inversion to ERTM. In the least-squares ERTM method, the forward operator generates multicomponent seismic data from the migrated images by applying elastic wavefield decomposition, scalar wavefield extrapolation, and wavefield recomposition operators. Additionally, the adjoint operator generates PP and PS images using ERTM, at which point the wavefield decomposition operator and scalar imaging condition are applied in the imaging process. Compared to conventional ERTM, our least-squares ERTM method enables us to produce improved ERTM images with higher resolution, more balanced amplitudes, and fewer artifacts. Several synthetic and field data examples were used to validate the effectiveness of the proposed least-squares ERTM method.