Seismic stacking in a wider perspective

Stacking can be seen as part of the well-known correlation process: ‘stacking is zero-shift cross-correlation’. Hence, the stack yields one element out of a larger data volume. By computing this larger data volume (‘generalized stacking’), the original unstacked input can be fully recovered (‘generalized destacking’). If we look at the physics behind those mathematical transformations, generalized stacking represents a focussing process and generalized destacking represents a defocussing process. In this paper it is proposed to extend the traditional stack to focal transformation. In addition, it is proposed to formulate focal transformation in terms of constrained inversion.