Full Wavefield Migration by Inversion

Conventional seismic processing treats high-order reflected events as noise and tremendous efforts have been spent on their removal. Because of the extra interactions with the subsurface, multiples can be used as effective signal. When combined properly, the full wavefield including primaries and high-order reflections can significantly improve the illumination of the subsurface compared to primaries only. However, crosstalk has always been a major challenge for the joint imaging algorithm. In this paper, we present a Least-Squares inversion solution for depth imaging of the full recorded wavefield. The method effectively reduces the crosstalk and enhances the resolution by fully taking advantage of the extended illumination of all orders of reflections present in the data.