A numerical tour of wave propagation

Brief overview

One-way equation based imaging techniques are inadequate to obtain accurate images in complex media due to propagation direction changes in the background model (Biondi, 2006). These approaches are extremely limited when handling the problems of turning waves in the model containing sharp wave-speed contrasts and steeply dipping reflectors. As an advanced imaging technology without dip and extreme lateral velocity limitation, reverse time migration (RTM) was proposed early (McMechan, 1983; Baysal et al., 1983), but not practical in terms of stringent computation and memory requirement. However, it gained increasingly attention in recent years due to the tremendous advances in computer capability. Until recently, 3D prestack RTM is now feasible to obtain high fidelity images (Guitton et al., 2006; Yoon et al., 2003).