Three-Dimensional GPR Ray Tracing Based on Wavefront Expansion With Irregular Cells

A new ray-tracing method in 3-D heterogeneous isotropic media is proposed based on the bilinear travel-time interpolation and wavefront group marching method (GMM). In this method, an irregular cell discretization scheme is used to accurately describe arbitrarily undulant interfaces in a model. The ray tracing is carried out by forward-backward processing. In the forward step, the travel time in an irregular cell is expressed in terms of the bilinear interpolation of the known travel times on the cell's surfaces. Then, the wavefront is evolved from the source to the whole computational domain by using the newly developed travel-time solver and the fast wavefront expansion GMM. In the backward step, each ray path is traced from the receiver by finding the intersection points of potential ray propagation vectors with the surfaces of the relevant cells. The same travel-time solver is used to compute the candidate intersection points on all surfaces of each relevant cell, and the point with the minimum travel time is selected as a ray point from which the similar step is continued until the sources are found. Several numerical experiments are presented to demonstrate that the new algorithm is accurate, efficient, and robust.