Vector-based excitation amplitude imaging condition for elastic RTM

In recent years, many studies have focused on elastic reverse time migration (RTM). In response to the problems associated with elastic RTM, we propose a new procedure for 2D elastic multicomponent RTM. In this new method, decomposed P- and S-wave components are obtained from the decoupled propagation of the source and receiver wavefields, which allows the expedient calculation of the Poynting vectors and the incident and reflection angles of the P- and S-waves. In addition, we deduce the vector-based excitation amplitude imaging condition. This process automatically accounts for the particle vibration directions when determining the angle-dependent signed reflection coefficients, and does not require the sign to be determined apart from the value of the reflection coefficients. This concept was further extended to the source-normalized crosscorrelation imaging condition. The reflection coefficient of the layered model test was in agreement with the Zoeppritz theory, the PP and PS wave images of the Marmousi II model were clear, and the PS wave images had higher resolution and richer details. In addition, since the calculated reflection coefficients are angle-dependent, they can be easily used for the extraction of angle-domain common-image gathers. Moreover, the imaging condition avoids the polarization reversal in PS wave images and does not require all of the source wavefield data. Consequently, the computation and storage requirements are significantly reduced, which will facilitate the use of the elastic RTM in practice.