Conclusion

We have presented a recursive wave-equation method of migration velocity analysis operating in the image domain. Our method is based on linearization of the downward continuation operator that relates perturbations in slowness to perturbations in the image. The fundamental idea is to improve the quality of the slowness function by optimizing the focusing of the migrated image.

This iterative method is stable and accurate when applied to a synthetic dataset. It also converges to the solution without the need for any regularization of the slowness model. We are currently in the process of applying the method to the real seismic dataset used as an example in this paper.