Diffraction enhancement in prestack seismic data

Seismic diffractions are often considered noise and are intentionally or implicitly suppressed during processing. Diffraction-like events include true diffractions, wave conversions, or fracture waves which may contain valuable information about the subsurface and could be used for interpretation or imaging. Using synthetic and field data, we examine workflows to separate diffractions from reflections that allow enhancement of diffraction-like signals and suppression of reflections. The workflows consist of combinations of standard processing modules. Most workflows apply normal moveout corrections to flatten reflection hyperbolas, which eases their removal. We observe that the most effective techniques are the decomposition of seismic gathers into eigensections and flows based on Radon transformations.