Comprehensive assessment of seismic acquisition geometries by focal beams -: Part I:: Theoretical considerations

The starting point for a relatively simple approach to data acquisition design can be found in the common focus point (CFP) philosophy, which describes seismic migration as a double focusing process. The migration output is presented as the combined result of focused source beams and focused detector beams for a given velocity model, revealing the potential amplitude accuracy and spatial resolution of a specific field geometry. In addition, any noise model can be fed into the input, and the subsequent beam-forming operations can be applied to predict the potential noise suppression rate. The economical optimization comes from the possibility of balancing the source and detector efforts as well as the acquisition and processing efforts.