Efficient reverse time migration with amplitude encoding

Reverse time migration (RTM) is an accurate seismic imaging method for imaging the complex subsurface structure. Traditional common shot RTM suffers from low efficiency due to the large number of single shot gathers, especially for marine seismic data. Phase encoding is commonly used to reduce the computational cost of RTM. Phase encoding in the frequency domain is usually related to time shift in the time domain. Therefore, phase-encoding-based RTM needs time padding to avoid information loss which degrades the efficiency of the time-domain wavefield extrapolator. In this paper, an efficient time-domain RTM scheme based on the amplitude encoding is proposed. This scheme uses the orthogonal cosine basis as the encoding function, which has similar physical meaning to plane wave encoding (i.e. plane-wave components with different surface shooting angles). The proposed scheme can generate a qualified imaging result as well as common shot RTM but with less computational cost. Since this scheme does not need time padding, it is more efficient than the phase encoding schemes and can be conveniently implemented in the time domain. Numerical examples on the Sigsbee2a synthetic dataset demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed method.