An improved fast converted-wave imaging method

The conventional fast converted-wave imaging method directly uses backward P- and converted S-wavefield to produce joint images. However, this image is accompanied by strong background noises, because the wavefields in all propagation directions contribute to it. Given this issue, we improve the conventional imaging method in the two aspects. First, the amplitude-preserved P- and S-wavefield are obtained by using an improved space-domain wavefield separation scheme to decouple the original elastic wavefield. Second, a converted-wave imaging condition is constructed based on the directional-wavefield separation and only the wavefields propagating in the same directions used for cross-correlation imaging, resulting in effectively eliminating the imaging artifacts of the wavefields with different directions; Complex-wavefield extrapolation is adopted to decompose the decoupled P- and S-wavefield into directional-wavefields during backward propagation, this improves the efficiency of the directional-wavefield separation. Experiments on synthetic data show that the improved method generates more accurate converted-wave images than the conventional one. Moreover, the improved method has application potential in micro-seismic and passive-source exploration due to its source-independent characteristic.