Abstract
Viscoacoustic migration can significantly compensate for the amplitude loss and phase distortion in migration images computed from highly attenuated data. However, solving the viscoacoustic wave equation requires a significant amount of storage space and computation time, especially for least-squares migration methods. To mitigate this problem, we used acoustic reverse time migration (RTM) instead of viscoacoustic migration to migrate the viscoacoustic data and then we correct the amplitude and phase distortion by hybrid deblurring filters in the image domain. Numerical tests on synthetic and field data demonstrate that acoustic RTM combined with hybrid deblurring filters can compensate for the attenuation effects and produce images with high resolution and balanced amplitudes. This procedure requires less than one-third of the storage space and is [Formula: see text] times faster compared with the viscoacoustic migration, but at the cost of mildly reduced accuracy. Here, [Formula: see text] represents the number of iterations used for least-squares migration method. This method can be extended to 3D migration at even a greater cost saving.