Geophysical imaging with arbitrary source illumination

Geophysical diffraction tomography is a technique for quantitative, high-resolution, subsurface imaging. This approach to imaging is a generalization of the conventional backprojection algorithm of X-ray tomography accounting for the diffraction effects that result from longer wavelength seismic or electromagnetic waves necessary for geophysical remote sensing. A diffraction tomography algorithm is presented for a configuration in which a finite number of sources of arbitrary character are distributed along one line and a finite number of receivers are distributed along a line having an arbitrary orientation with respect to the source line. Since most geophysical sources may be reasonably represented as point sources, the two-dimensional form of the algorithm is implemented for cylindrical-beam (a point source in two dimensions) illumination. Numerical experiments are performed to investigate a range of source-receiver configurations. It is found that parallel source and receiver arrays, a cross-borehole configuration, provide better image quality than orthogonal arrays.>