The use of Poynting vector in wave-field decomposition imaging condition for reverse-time migration

•We proposed a new imaging condition for reverse time migration.•The proposed imaging condition could suppress shallow noises, effectively.•The proposed imaging condition could reduce artifacts for reverse time migration.•Only 10% additional computation time is needed to implement the proposed imaging condition.•A truncation parameter is induced to balance the imaging ability and noise removal for the proposed imaging condition.

An imaging condition based on cross-correlation is developed for prestack reverse-time migration. The imaging condition integrates the advantage of wave-field decomposition and Poynting vector and has powerful ability in artifacts removal. A truncation parameter is employed to balance imaging ability and artifacts removal in the imaging condition. The detail discussion has been done to verify the proposed imaging condition by lots of numerical simulation in a velocity model with vertical velocity gradient and Hess 2004 P-wave velocity model. The results show the proposed imaging condition works well to remove artifacts and improve imaging quality in these tests effectively.