Removing Smearing-Effect Artifacts in Angle-Domain Common-Image Gathers from Reverse Time Migration

Local plane-wave decomposition (LPWD) and local shift imaging condition (LSIC) methods for extracting angle-domain common-image gathers (ADCIGs) from prestack reverse time migration are based on the local plane-wave assumption, and both suffer from a trade-off in choosing the local window size. Small windows produce clean ADCIGs, but with low angle resolution, whereas large windows produce noisy ADCIGs, which include smearing-effect artifacts, but with high angle resolution. The cause of the smearing-effect artifacts in LPWD is the crosscorrelation of plane waves obtained by decomposition of the source and receiver wavefronts, at points that do not lie on the source wavefront excitation time trajectory. The cause of the smearing-effect artifacts in LSIC is the decomposition of curved events of offset-domain common-image gathers (ODCIGs) at incorrect depth points at zero offset. These artifacts can occur even if the migration velocity model is correct. Two methods were proposed to remove the artifacts. In the LPWD method, the smearing-effect artifacts were removed by decomposing and crosscorrelating the resulting source and receiver plane waves only at image points and excitation (image) times. In the LSIC method, the artifacts were removed by decomposing curved events in ODCIGs into planar events only at zero-offset target image points. Numerical tests with synthetic data revealed the success of the proposed methods.