Joint migration inversion versus FWI-RTM

Abstract

Joint migration inversion (JMI) is a recently developed technology that aims at incorporating the seismic velocity model update and acoustic migration, including all multiple scatterings, into one closed-loop process. Full waveform inversion (FWI) is a commonly accepted technology for velocity model building, and reverse-time migration (RTM) is the main method adopted for depth imaging. In this paper we first use a 2D realistic deep water model to benchmark JMI against a workflow of FWI combined with RTM. With some insights on JMI gained from this comparison study, we point out that a good niche for JMI is to provide a high quality initial velocity model. We further demonstrate the performance of JMI on a 2D deep water field dataset with an initial velocity model derived from migration velocity analysis (MVA).