His presentation scored one of the highest out of the 1 163 presentations at the 2017 Annual Meeting Technical Program and was judged on delivery, material, slides and overall presentation.

'Broadband least-squares wave-equation migration' was the title of his abstract which was co-authored with Xiang Li, A.A. Valenciano, Nizar Chemingui (all PGS) and Cheng Cheng (UC Berkeley).

In a congratulatory letter to Dr Lu, the President of SEG, Dorsey Morrow wrote 'Congratulations on your excellent technical presentation titled, Broadband least-squares wave-equation migration, presented at the 2017 SEG Annual Meeting in Houston, Texas.  Your research and preparation were also noticed by your fellow SEG members, who judged your paper, ranking it in the top 39 papers presented at the Houston meeting.'

Least-squares migration (LSM) was a key topic at the SEG this year and Dr Lu's presentation highlighted how LSM can correct for overburden effects, variations in illumination and incomplete acquisition geometry.  He illustrated this with applications of LSM to both synthetic and field data examples (from the Gulf of Mexico and the North Sea) and the results deliver higher resolution images with better amplitude balance when compared with standard seismic migration.

North Sea 3D NAZ field data example. Left: WEM results; Right: Iterative LS-WEM results. The depth slice is at 1.8 km.