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We present a least-squares reverse time migration (LSRTM) method using a factorization-free priorconditioning approach to overcome the low signal-to-noise (SNR) problem arising out of using severely undersampled data. Priorconditioning is a technique where the prior information is incorporated directly into the forward operator and into the solution space of the problem. The prior information that is used in this work is that the inverted reflectivity is sparse in the radon domain. The proposed method is factorization-free since the forward mapping is defined through the action of a sparse operator on a vector. The priorconditioning method is shown to produce reliable images with good SNR and free from aliasing artifacts when using very sparse shots for both synthetic and field data.

We present a method for inverting seismic reflections using full-waveform inversion (FWI) with inaccurate starting models. For a layered medium, near-offset reflections (with zero angle of incidence) are unlikely to be cycle-skipped regardless of the low-wavenumber velocity error in the initial models. Therefore, we use them as a starting point for FWI, and the subsurface velocity model is then updated during the FWI iterations using reflection wavepaths from varying offsets that are not cycle-skipped. To enhance low-wavenumber updates and accelerate the convergence, we take several passes through the non-linear GaussSeidel iterations, where we invert traces from a narrow range of near offsets and finally end at the far offsets. Every pass is followed by applying smoothing to the cumulative slowness update. The smoothing is strong at the early stages and relaxed at later iterations to allow for a gradual reconstruction of the subsurface model in a multiscale manner. Applications to synthetic and field data, starting from inaccurate models, show significant low-wavenumber updates and flattening of common-image gathers after many iterations.

We propose an interferometric least-squares migration method that can significantly reduce migration artifacts due to statics and errors in the near-surface velocity model. We first choose a reference reflector whose topography is well known from the, e.g., well logs. Reflections from this reference layer are correlated with the traces associated with reflections from deeper interfaces to get crosscorrelograms. These crosscorrelograms are then migrated using interferometric least-squares migration (ILSM). In this way statics and velocity errors at the near surface are largely eliminated for the examples in our paper.

We propose sparse least-squares reverse time migration (LSRTM) using seislets as a basis for the reflectivity distribution. This basis is used along with a dip-constrained preconditioner that emphasizes image updates only along prominent dips during the iterations. These dips can be estimated from the standard migration image or from the gradient using plane-wave destruction filters or structural tensors. Numerical tests on synthetic datasets demonstrate the benefits of this method for mitigation of aliasing artifacts and crosstalk noise in multisource least-squares migration.