Locating point diffractors in layered media by spatial dynamics

Abstract

We present a new approach to the problem of detecting point diffractors from active source surface seismic data. We formulate an optimization problem in the configuration space of possible collections of scatterers and construct a birth-and-death spatial dynamic, which converges to the optimal solution. By design, this dynamic does not have resolution limits typical of migration based techniques, which allows for subwavelength sensing.