Choosing a Good Set of Beams For Rapid Prestack Depth Migration

Rapid beam migration requires the decomposition of seismic data into a set of beams. Beams are functions that are local in space and dip. The sum of all the beams must be a good approximation of the input data. We must also be able to migrate the beams and create a good approximation of the final image. We review some of the choices available for forming beams and conclude that it is worth incurring the cost of a more expensive beam decomposition if it results in a parsimonious set of beams with high dip accuracy.