Hierarchical decomposition and its application in seismic inversion and migration

Hierarchical decomposition is the process of decomposing the actual wave field into a set of scattered wave fields which account for an increase of the complexity of the scattering domain with respect to the embedding. Unlike the linearization process in iterative Born-type inversion methods (like the distorted-wave Born method), hierarchical decomposition is data-driven, that is, the decomposition process is guided by the information that is available in the data. This paper discusses the consequences for seismic inversion and migration.