Trace-imposed stretch correction in Kirchhoff prestack time migration

Kirchhoff prestack time migration, which works trace-by-trace, remains appealing to academia and industry due to its robustness and efficiency. However, like the other prestack migration methods, Kirchhoff prestack time migration also suffers from the angle-dependent stretching effect, which narrows the amplitude spectra of seismic data. This effect gets more severe as the incident angle increases. In this paper, we propose a novel approach, which attaches a prediction shaping filter to the Kirchhoff prestack time migration, to mitigate the stretching effect. Our approach takes advantage on the trace-by-trace implementation of the prestack time migration algorithm, without the output of the angle-domain common-imaging gather. Also, our method can cascade with Q-compensation in prestack time migration. We demonstrate our method with both a numerical example and a field data example.