Kirchhoff or wave equation?

Wave equation (or wave field extrapolation) techniques have been used in industry for the past few years, with the purpose to improve the accuracy of 3D depth imaging over the conventional Kirchhoff migration. However, on many field data examples using different wave equation implementations from different processing shops, we have seen high-quality imaging from both Kirchhoff and wave equation techniques. In the near future, we see that both Kirchhoff and wave equation implementations will continue to serve high fidelity imaging needs and also complement each other in terms of strengths and weaknesses. The benefits of wave equation methods would be significant and overwhelming, perhaps, when we have advanced the acquisition technology to obtain true 3D marine data in the future.