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This note is devoted to the confrontation of intuitive ideas in the field of inverse problems, especially in tomographic seismological studies, with the results of a more rigorous approach. With the help of a simple example, we show that tests commonly used to illustrate the quality of inversion results can be misleading. Based on a classical mathematical analysis, we explain the origin of the problems that we have seen. Our main conclusion is that, in circumstances not so unrealistic, and in contradiction to a generally idea, small-size structures like in the ‘checker-board test’ can be well retrieved while larger structures are poorly retrieved.
Lévêque et al. (Fri,) studied this question.