Reverse-time-migration of multiply scattered seismic waves

Multiply scattered waves, including internal multiples, are rarely considered as signal when imaging with seismic waves. Reverse-time-migration techniques accurately handle the propagation of such complex scattered waves, but most of these techniques paradoxically do not fully utilize the illumination and energy of multiply scattered waves because these methods rely on the single-scattering assumption. We use a scattering-based approach for reverse-time-migration to overcome the limitations of linear imaging. Our method consists of adapting the conventional backpropagation techniques in order to more accurately reconstruct scattered wavefields and of using a nonlinear adaptive imaging condition in order to map the information contained in these newly extrapolated wavefields into an image of the subsurface. We illustrate these two concepts with a synthetic example of sub-salt imaging.