Estimation approach to locating buried geological interfaces

The objective of the estimation work described in this paper is to improve algorithms for reconstructing the geometric configuration of acoustic reflecting surfaces. The conventional migration method of locating these surfaces is reviewed. A recent imaging condition which is closely related to the boundary condition at the geological interface is then described. This later 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 method is degraded. To improve the performance an empirical model for the noisy reflected signal is proposed, and its parameters are estimated. Computer-generated synthetic data are used to test the performance of the algorithms for a SNR range of -10dB to 10dB and for both normal incidence and non-normal incidence.