Steep Dipping Structure Depth Imaging Using Wave Equation Based Migration Schemes on 3‐D Sparse Dataset

We propose a wave equation based migration scheme for imaging the steep dipping structures with 3-D sparsely sampled dataset, especially sparsely sampled in the crossline direction. The scheme is developed based on the hybrid domain (wavenumber and space) wave equation based migration methods. The problem for imaging the steep dipping structures can be solved by applying anti-alias one-way propagator together with filling zero traces into the original sparsely sampled data (to generate dataset with a sufficient sampling). The proposed scheme overcomes a main difficulty when applying wave equation based migration methods to the field data. As a result, good imaging can be obtained for complex structures by using wave equation based migration methods. The proposed scheme is demonstrated by 2-D Marmousi dataset and 3-D field data. The proposed scheme will be much helpful to the current 3-D dataset.