Comparison of crosswell diffraction tomography to Kirchhoff migration

Abstract

Crosswell seismic diffraction tomography is a new waveform inversion algorithm and has great potential for producing higher resolution images than conventional traveltime tomography. The objective of this paper is to identify the inherent relationship between diffraction tomography and Kirchhoff migration. Both of them can be considered as multi-dimentional inverse scattering problems. However, it is found that crosswell diffraction tomography inverts for the low-wavenumber components of the velocity scattering potential, while Kirchhoff migration inverts for the high-wavenumber components. To achieve the highest image resolution, both low-wavenumber components and high wavenumbers should be recovered; this means that diffraction tomography and wave-equation migration should be integrated in order to obtain the full-wavenumber spectrum images.