Flexible b-spline model parameterization designed for reflection tomography

Abstract : Reflection tomography is an efficient method to determine a subsurface velocity model that best fits the traveltime data associated to the main events picked on the seismic sections. A careful choice of the model representation has to be done: a blocky model representation based on regular gridded b-spline functions has been proposed. This flexible parameterization allows accurate and robust inversion but can lead to a huge number of parameters. An adaptive parameterization that enables to account for local complexities and inhomogeneous ray coverage is considered.