Born Inversion by Wavefield Backpropagation

The inverse scattering problem for an acoustic medium is formulated by using the variable background Born approximation. A constant density acoustic medium is probed by a wide-band point source, and the scattered field is observed along a curved receiver array located outside the region where the medium velocity is different from the assumed background velocity function. The solution that we propose relies on the introduction of a backpropagated field. This field is obtained by using a finite-difference scheme backwards in time to backpropagate into the medium the scattered field observed along the receiver array. The backpropagated field is imaged at the source travel times, giving an image of the same type as obtained by reverse-time finite-difference migration techniques. The gradient of this image is then taken along rays linking the source to points in the medium, and after scaling, this gives the reconstructed potential. To relate the reconstructed potential to the true scattering potential, we use high frequency asymptotics and an additional approximation introduced by Beylkin [1]. These approximations reduce the validity of our reconstruction procedure to the high wavenumber region. With these approximations, it is shown that at a given point, the reconstructed potential corresponds to the convolution of the true potential with a weighting function obtained by partially reconstructing an impulse from its projections inside a cone. The angular range of this cone is totally determined by the geometry of the receiver array, and by the relative location of the source with respect to the point that we consider. In the special case when the receiver array surrounds the domain where the scattering