The prestack migration of common-shot section based on the wave equation has produced high quality seismic images. However, for a 3-D dataset, this process involves a huge number of computational operations and its high cost impedes its daily use in data processing. Methods that can reduce the number of migrations, as plane wave migration, requested for a complete seismic experiment, are very attractive, mainly, in the 3-D seismic data processing. Plane wave migration can also produce high quality images that are comparable to those of shot migration with much less computational cost. The prestack plane wave migration implemented in this work is applied along constant ray parameter sections, obtained through the decomposition of the data arranged in common receiver gathers taking by the Slant-Stack transform. Then these sections are extrapolated in depth using the Split-Step extrapolation operator. The images in depth are obtained by summing all frequencies of interest from all migrated constant ray parameter sections. The source plane wave method was applied in two synthetic seismic datasets and the results achieved with the new migration method simulating a plane wave source has produced good quality subsurface images, comparable with those from common-shot gathers migration with a lower computational cost.
Prestack depth migration; Split-Step operator; plane wave migration
