Thick Paleozoic-Mesozoic marine carbonate strata are deep buried and wide distributed in the South Yellow Sea residual basin, in which oil and gas exploration is still in prospect investigation and evaluation stages. Analysis shows that there are many difficulties of seismic data acquisition and processing caused by the special seismic and geological conditions in this area, which are: the complex and changeable propagation path of seismic waves caused by complex geologic structures, the propagating-down seismic wave amplitude getting weak resulted by high-velocity carbonate shield layers, and poor environments of marine seismic work, and so on. Based on the complex difficulties and conditions such as seismic multiples, reflected amplitude weak and low SNR of deep target layers, the low-accuracy seismic imaging and the poor data quality, some corresponding strategies of exploration are put forward that: 1) going deep into study of theoretical simulation, 2) applying the time-lapse explosion of multilevel airgun array and the stereo broad-line reception by "expanding reflection spread and over/under streamers" to broaden the seismic bandwidth and promote the reflection energy of deep layers; 3) suppressing multiple waves to improve weak reflection energy of middle to deep target layers; 4) analyzing the anisotropic velocity for expanding reflection spread and the anisotropic pre-stack time migration to improve the ability of complex structure imaging.