Echoreconstruction techniques for subsurface imaging, widely
used in oil exploration, are based on experiments in which short acoustic impulses, emitted at the surface, illuminate a certain volume and are backscattered by inhomogeneities of the medium. The inhomogeneities act as reflecting surfaces which cause signal echoing; the echoes are then recorded at the surface and processed through a propagation model (which acts as a “computational lens”) to yield an image of those very inhomogeneities.
Migration, based on the scalar wave equation, is the standard imaging technique for seismic applications [1]. In the migration process, the recorded pressure waves(called the seismic traces or the seismic section) are used as initial conditions for a wave field governed by the scalar wave equation in an inhomogeneous medium
