The Marmousi experience; velocity model determination on a synthetic complex data set

The motivation behind seismic data acquisition and processing is simple—to obtain a depth image of the earth—but performing this process correctly is extremely difficult. A number of well known processing tasks (such as static corrections, deconvolution, multiple elimination, velocity estimation, and migration) have to be executed, and each directly influences the final result. However, the success of the velocity estimation is paramount and critical, and large amounts of man/CPU hours are devoted to it.