A SAMPLE OF CONTROLLED EXPERIMENTS IN DIFFRACTION TOMOGRAPHY

Various applications of a new geophysical reconstruction method, generalized acoustical diffraction tomography (GADT), which is based on transmission data as input are considered. Conventional diffraction tomography methods normally require linearization with respect to a uniform reference medium and regular sampling along a straight line. Thus, these methods will not work well when the background is strongly non-uniform and/or the acquisition geometry is arbitrary. However, GADT can, in principle, handle both irregularly spaced data, curved acquisition lines, and non-uniform background models. A number of controlled model tank and field experiments, where the model and the test object(s) are known a priori, have been carried out. After acquiring the tomographic data in each experiment, these are used to compute a reconstruction of the model, which can then be compared with the actual, known model. The method's ability to yield high-quality images of the different targets is demonstrated.