Reverse Time Holography – RTH  a new method of seismic data processing based on the reversal of the wave field in time and  seismic holographic interferometry

Some words about background and history of researches. The main idea of optical holography is based on the fixing the amplitude and phase of the wave scattered by object. The mechanism of such fixing uses the interference between scattered wave and some reference wave. It is so called two beams interferometry.  The interference is «frozen» by a photographic plate, used later when creating a holographic image (Gabor, 1948).

 Over 40 years ago, the ideas of optical holography were actively used when trying to create new mathematical methods for seismic data processing (Fitzpatrick et al., 1972).

As the result, during these  way,  such methods as Kirchhoff depth migration, Reverse Time Migration (RTM)  (Baysal et al., 1983; McMechan, 1983) and Full Wave Inversion methods (Tarantola, 1984; Virieux, et al., 2009)   were have been  developed.

Until now, some researchers continue to consider that, in a sense, seismic data is seismic holography (Robinson et.al, 2010). We agree with them. And so the method Reverse Time Holography (RTH) allows embodying the idea of optical holography to seismic data processing workflow (Erokhin et al., 2017, 2018a, 2018b; Erokhin, 2019).

Of course the RTH approach requires more computational power than the conventional RTM-based methods, but It provides research on the structural, geological, and petro physical properties of medium at a new qualitative and quantitative level

The RTH method is based on:

• Theories of adjoint equations and reversing the wave field in time
• Numerical spatial-temporal modeling of wave interference (holography)
• Statistical accumulation of interference results (analogue — a set of photographic plates)
• Filtering events of multidimensional statistical distribution
• Statistical estimation of multidimensional distribution parameters
• Multidimensional imaging technologies
• Parallel Computing on Supercomputers
• Extra large data processing