Ongoing R&D in Ray-based Tomography - Well Worth the Effort

Over the past 20 years, ray-based post-migration reflection tomography has remained largely unchallenged as a velocity model building tool for seismic depth imaging. While other, more mathematically attractive methods have been proposed, they have yet to be adopted into standard workflows. The decisive elements for such tools are: accuracy, resolution, flexibility, ease of use, and turnaround time. The success of depth domain tomography comes from the good balance it offers between those elements. This paper aims to illustrate with a few practical innovations in post migration tomography, that ray based approaches are still making progress and are nowadays finding applications far beyond their expected range of validity.