From Bureau of Economic Geology, The University of Texas at Austin (www.beg.utexas.edu).
For more information, please contact the author.

Bureau Seminar, October 29, 2004

Planned seismic imaging using explicit, one-way operators

Dr. Rob Ferguson
Assistant Professor
Department of Geological Sciences
The University of Texas at Austin
512-471-6405

Abstract:

A method is presented to compare the accuracy and computational cost of explicit one-way extrapolation operators as used in seismic imaging. For a given model, accuracy is measured in terms of lateral positioning error, and cost is calculated relative to the cost of the spatial fast Fourier transform. The result is a planned imaging scheme that achieves the greatest accuracy with respect to the velocity model for a fixed cost.

To demonstrate, I use a 2D section of the EAGE/SEG salt model and assemble a suite of the most common operators. The data are imaged using each operator individually, and the results are compared with the result from the plan-based algorithm. The planned image is shown to return improved accuracy at no additional cost.