Fast Beam Migration - A Step Toward Interactive Imaging

This paper presents an effort toward interactive migration. A prestack depth-domain fast beam migration algorithm is implemented. To achieve efficiency, only picked events are migrated. Picked events in the time domain form a new dataset which is a small fraction of the original dataset in terms of volume. Furthermore, events are migrated wavelet by wavelet instead of sample by sample. The wavelet is mapped into depth domain in the format of a patch. Coherent noise and migration artifacts in migration image are reduced by multi-path migration and intrinsically used dipping information The idea of multi-path algorithm is borrowed from the Gaussian beam migration technique, but only picked events with certain p values (event slowness) are migrated. The resulting Sigsbee image using fast beam migration is superior to that of conventional Kirchhoff migration with a speed-up of at least one order of magnitude.