Resolution in crosswell traveltime tomography: The dependence on illumination

Abstract

The key aspect limiting resolution in crosswell traveltime tomography is illumination, a well-known result but not well-exemplified. We have revisited resolution in the 2D case using a simple geometric approach based on the angular aperture distribution and the Radon transform properties. We have analytically found that if an isolated interface had dips contained in the angular aperture limits, it could be reconstructed using just one particular projection. By inversion of synthetic data, we found that a slowness field could be approximately reconstructed from a set of projections if the interfaces delimiting the slowness field had dips contained in the available angular apertures. On the one hand, isolated artifacts might be present when the dip is near the illumination limit. On the other hand, in the inverse sense, if an interface is interpretable from a tomogram, there is no guarantee that it corresponds to a true interface. Similarly, if a body is present in the interwell region, it is diffusely imaged, but its interfaces, particularly vertical edges, cannot be resolved and additional artifacts might be present. Again, in the inverse sense, there is no guarantee that an isolated anomaly corresponds to a true anomalous body, because this anomaly could be an artifact. These results are typical of ill-posed inverse problems: an absence of a guarantee of correspondence to the true distribution. The limitations due to illumination may not be solved by the use of constraints. Crosswell tomograms derived with the use of sparsity constraints, using the discrete cosine transform and Daubechies bases, essentially reproduce the same features seen in tomograms obtained with the smoothness constraint. Interpretation must be done taking into consideration a priori information and the particular limitations due to illumination, as we have determined with a real data case.