Seismic Migration: A Digital Filtering Process Reducing Oil Exploration Risks [Applications Corner]

Humans consider oil and gas to be important natural energy resources: they are used to fuel our cars, generate power, and produce plastics and fertilizers, among other things. To produce oil or gas, we need first to determine the subsurface structure. This can be done by the reflection seismology method. This geophysical technique relies on the generation of artificial seismic waves and the recording of their reflections from different geological layers. However, such acquired seismic data does not reveal an accurate image of the subsurface unless we use appropriate signal processing such as frequency and/or wavenumber filtering, multichannel and/ or multidimensional filtering, deconvolution, and so on [1].