Wavefield decomposition approach upgraded for an application to multiple removal

The removal of multiple reflections remains a major challenge in seismic data processing. We develop a new method, inspired by the wavefield decomposition approach developed by Nemeth3 and based on a linearized waveform inversion to attenuate multiple reflections. Compared to Nemeth’s algorithm, we reduce significantly the inversion CPU time by a judicious formulation of the inverse problem. The computational cost for multiple elimination is then negligible compared to the standard linearized inversion cost.