3-D prestack depth migration: Why Kirchhoff?

3-D prestack depth migration is emerging as an industrial imaging tool. Many competing algorithms have been proposed by various authors. Nevertheless, the real bottleneck in 3D prestack processes is the sheer amount of input and output data. This paper reviews the principal migration methods on the basis of their capacity for data manipulation, without evaluating the algorithms themselves. It concludes that Kirchhoff methods are the best first candidates, while other methods dealing with subsets of input data may have to be taken into account in the future.