Introduction

Reverse-time migration (McMechan, 1983) has been widely used in seismic exploration imaging because of its ability to accurately implement the two-way wave equation. The most popular way to implement reverse time migration is time-extrapolation from the maximum time to the minimum time with the recorded wave field as boundary condition. This algorithm does not pass Claerbout's dot-product test (Claerbout, 1992), which means that this algorithm is not the conjugate of the time-extrapolation modeling algorithm. This paper describes the implementation of a reverse-time migration algorithm as an exact conjugate operator of the forward time-extrapolation modeling.