Seismic Processing - What is Required?

In a turnaround and cost-conscious environment, do we really need to apply all the algorithmic processes in a seismic processing sequence? Full wavefield migration may be one way to eliminate certain processes. If we treat the full wavefield migrated image as part of an inverse problem in a least-squares migration, we may exclude more steps. Least-squares full wavefield migration (Lu et al., 2018) uses the raw seismic data, and many processing steps in both the data and image domain can be excluded, potentially reducing turnaround whilst maintaining, or improving, image quality for the entire data record.