AccScience Publishing / JSE / Online First / DOI: 10.36922/JSE026280132
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Least-squares one-way wave-equation migration with matrix-decomposition propagation and sparse denoising regularization

Guangyin Wang1,2 Pengyuan Sun1,2 Xinyu Zhang3* Bin Li1,2 Xueying Hu1,2 Heng Zhang1,2 Jiachun You3
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1 BGP Inc., China National Petroleum Corporation, Zhuozhou, Hebei , China
2 National Engineering Research Center of Oil and Gas Exploration Computer Software, Zhuozhou, Hebei , China
3 College of Geophysics, Chengdu University of Technology, Chengdu, Sichuan , China
Received: 7 July 2026 | Revised: 14 August 2026 | Accepted: 26 August 2026 | Published online: 14 September 2026
© 2026 by the Author(s). This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ )
Abstract

Conventional one-way wave-equation migration methods often suffer from phase errors, amplitude distortions, and low-amplitude artifacts in the presence of strong lateral velocity variations, complex structures, and noisy data. To address these problems, we propose a sparse-denoising-constrained least-squares one-way wave-equation migration method. A one-way propagation operator is first constructed in the space–frequency domain using matrix eigenvalue decomposition to improve the stability and phase accuracy of wavefield depth extrapolation in laterally heterogeneous media. Recursive primary wavefield modeling is then used to establish the forward relationship between the reflectivity model and surface primary reflection data, and the data-misfit gradient is computed through adjoint propagation. Furthermore, a curvelet-transform denoiser regularization term is introduced, so that the data-residual gradient and denoising-residual gradient jointly guide the reflectivity update. Numerical experiments on the Lens, Marmousi, and Overthrust models show that the proposed method produces clearer reflection interfaces, more continuous events, and more stable residual convergence than least-squares migration based on the generalized-screen propagation operator. Noisy-data tests further demonstrate that the proposed sparse denoising constraint improves peak signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and structural similarity index under 5 dB, 1 dB, and −5 dB noise conditions, especially preserving structural similarity under strong noise. These results demonstrate the improved stability, resolution, and structural fidelity of the proposed method for complex synthetic models and low-SNR synthetic data.

Keywords
One-way wave-equation migration
Least-squares migration
Matrix eigenvalue decomposition
Curvelet-transform denoiser
Sparse denoising constraint
Funding
This work was supported by the open research project of the National Engineering Research Center for Oil and Gas Exploration Computer Software (DFWT-ZYRJ-2025-JS-56) and the Sichuan Science and Technology Program (2026NSFSC0234).
Conflict of interest
The authors declare that they have no competing interests.
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Journal of Seismic Exploration, Print ISSN: 0963-0651, Published by AccScience Publishing