Relating source-receiver interferometry to an inverse-scattering series to derive a new method to estimate internal multiples

An explicit relationship between the representations of internal multiples by source-receiver interferometry and an inverse-scattering series is presented. This provides new insight into the interaction of different terms in each of these internal multiple prediction equations, and explains why amplitudes of estimated multiples are typically incorrect. A downside of the existing representations is that their computational cost is extremely high, which can be a precluding factor especially in 3D applications. Using our insight from source-receiver interferometry, we introduce an alternative, computationally more efficient way to predict internal multiples. The new formula is based on cross-correlation and convolution, two operations that are computationally cheap and routinely used in interferometric methods. We compare the results of the standard and the alternative formula both qualitatively in terms of the constructed wavefields and quantitatively in terms of the computational cost using examples from a synthetic data set.