A modified excitation amplitude imaging condition for prestack reverse time migration

In wave-equation-based migration, the imaging condition is an important factor that impacts migration accuracy and efficiency. Among the commonly used imaging conditions, the excitation amplitude imaging condition has high resolution, accuracy and low storage and input/output burden when compared with others. However, the excitation amplitude extracted by this imaging condition in its current form will produce a distorted migration image for certain scenarios. In this paper, a modified excitation amplitude imaging condition is proposed that addresses the above problem and produces migrated images free from distortion for complicated geologic models. In this paper, we propose a method to effectively use the modified shortest path method (MSPM) for extracting the maximum amplitude around the first-arrival events. Then, the excitation amplitude imaging condition is applied to obtain a continuous and clear migration image. This process can, to some extent, improve the distorted migration image produced by the traditional excitation amplitude imaging condition. Some numerical tests with synthetic data of Sigsbee2a and Marmousi-II models show that the improvement is feasible and effective in complex-structure media.