Target-oriented reverse time migration in transverse isotropy media

Reverse time migration (RTM) is a high-precision imaging method for complex structures. However, without considering seismic anisotropy of the subsurface, RTM utilizing the anisotropic seismic data may produce blurred structure images with incorrect positions. Moreover, some exploration targets with insufficient illumination cannot be effectively identified in the migration profile, especially the subsalt structure which is usually the favorable petroleum region for the hydrocarbon reservoir. Therefore, we develop a target-oriented RTM in transverse isotropy media (TO-TIRTM). Instead of classical RTM, the novel method extracts wavefields that carry relatively more information about the exploration target to image structure. In the imaging condition, the constraint with excitation time is introduced to eliminate the interference of multipath on the image. Using synthetic examples, we determined that the kinematic characteristic of wavefield is closely related to anisotropic parameters, and the proposed method has prominent advantages over conventional RTM for imaging insufficient illumination structure.