The Hartley transform in seismic imaging

Phase‐shift migration techniques that attempt to account for lateral velocity variations make substantial use of the fast Fourier transform (FFT). Generally, the Hermitian symmetry of the complex‐valued Fourier transform causes computational redundancies in terms of the number of operations and memory requirements. In practice a combination of the FFT with the well‐known real‐to‐complex Fourier transform is often used to avoid such complications. As an alternative means to the Fourier transform, we introduce the inherently real‐valued, non‐symmetric Hartley transform into phase‐shift migration techniques. By this we automatically avoid the Hermitian symmetry resulting in an optimized algorithm that is comparable in efficiency to algorithms based on the real‐to‐complex FFT. We derive the phase‐shift operator in the Hartley domain for migration in two and three dimensions and formulate phase shift plus interpolation, split‐step migration, and split‐step double‐square‐root prestack migration in terms of the ...