Towards an Edge-preserving Stereotomography with a Practical Model Regularization Technique

Despite of the limitation of the ray theory, an edge-preserving velocity model is always preferred for any a ray-based tomography method. In this abstract, we present a practical model regularization technique towards this goal by incorporating the blocky geological boundary information when deriving the Fréchet derivatives matrix of the stereotomography. The updated model will automatically present the blocky geological boundary feature as it is supposed to be. The geological boundary information will be updated at the end of each iteration with a kinematic migration based on some zero-offset horizons picked in advance. Compared with the conventional edge preserving tomography or the multi-layer stereotomgraphy, the presented regularization technique does not depend on a hybrid velocity format or the hybrid regularization based on the edge preserving smooth operator. It is more straightforward and more easily implemented. The synthetic data example and the real data case demonstrated the effectiveness of the presented method. We expect that the inverted model can be used for reverse-time migration or as the good starting model for full-wave inversion.