Wavepath migration versus Kirchhoff migration: 3-D prestack examples

As a less costly alternative to Kirchhoff migration (KM), wavepath migration (WM) was primarily developed for reducing computational costs. In addition, far-field mi- gration artifacts can be suppressed because of the anti- aliasing feature inherent in the WM method. Our results with 3-D prestack synthetic data show that WM generates fewer migration artifacts and can sometimes define com- plex structure better than KM. Results with 3-D prestack field data show that WM can reduce migration artifacts and can sometimes resolve the reflection interfaces better than KM. The CPU comparison shows that, for our syn- thetic and field data examples, 3-D WM can be more than an order-of-magnitude faster than 3-D KM. The drawback with WM is that it is sometimes sensitive to the recording geometry and signal-to-noise ratio for an accurate calcu- lation of the incidence angles.