*Article* **Elastic Reverse Time Migration for Weakly Illuminated Structure**

**Liwei Song 1,2,3,4, Ying Shi 1,2,3,5,\*, Wei Liu 1,2,3,5 and Qiang Zhao 1,2,3**


**Abstract:** One of the most effective techniques to obtain PP and PS images is elastic reverse time migration which employs multi-component seismic data. The two types of complementary images play an important role in reducing blind spots in seismic exploration. However, the migration image of deep structures is always blurred due to the shielding effect of overburden rock on seismic waves. To overcome this issue, we develop an elastic reverse time migration approach for insufficient illumination. This approach contains two crucial elements. The first is that we derive an elastic wave equation to extract the wavefields associated with the exploration target using the staining algorithm. Secondly, we develop an inner product imaging condition with a filter to mute migrated artifacts. The filter, consisting of two vectors, determines which part of the wavefield is contributed to imaging. Synthetic examples exhibit that the proposed elastic reverse time migration method can improve the signal-to-noise ratio of PP and PS images of weakly illuminated structures.

**Keywords:** reverse time migration; stained elastic wave equation; weak illumination
