An implicit stabilization strategy for Q-compensated reverse-time migration

Reverse time migration with Q compensation (Q-RTM) is an effective approach to enhance the resolution of seismic images because it retrieves the amplitude loss and phase distortion induced by the viscosity of media. According to the crosscorrelation imaging condition, Q-RTM requires compensation for the amplitude loss in the propagation paths of source and receiver wavefields, which can be realized by solving an amplitude-boosted wave equation. However, the amplitude-boosted simulations suffer from numerical instability due to the amplification of high-frequency noise. We have developed a robust stabilization strategy for Q-RTM by incorporating a time-variant filter into the amplitude-boosted wavefield extrapolation step. We modify the Fourier spectrum of the operator that controls the amplitude compensation to be time variant, and we add to the spectrum a stabilization factor. Doing so, we integrate the time-variant filter into the viscoacoustic wave propagator implicitly, and we avoid any explicit filtering operation in Q-RTM. We verify the robustness of this stabilized Q-RTM with two synthetic data examples. We also apply this technique to a field data set to demonstrate the imaging improvements compared to an acoustic RTM and a more traditional Q-RTM method.