Application of computer simulation in estimating geological reflector locations

The objective of this paper is to improve algorithms for reconstructing the geometric configuration of acoustic reflecting surfaces. A recent modification to the conventional migration method of locating these surfaces is briefly discussed. This procedure results in two outputs: one can be used to reconstruct the shape of the unknown acoustic reflector, while the second output estimates the acoustic wavespeed on the transmission side of the boundary. When noise is present in the reflected signal, the performance of the recent method is degraded. To improve the performance an empirical model for the noisy reflected signal is proposed, and its parameters are estimated. Frequency weighted least squares method (WLSM) is used to estimate these parameters. Computer-generated synthetic data are used to test the performance of the estimation technique for a signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) range of -10 dB to 10 dB. The results show that the developed estimation technique indeed improves the performance of the recent method in noisy situations