Kinematic Invariants Describinh Locally Coherent Events: An Efficient and Flexible Approach to Non-Linear Tomography

Slope tomography allows estimating velocity models from locally coherent events. These events can be picked in the prestack depth or time migrated domains, and then de-migrated into the prestack time un-migrated domain, providing what we call kinematic invariants. Kinematic invariants describe locally coherent events by their position and slopes in the unmigrated prestack time domain. Non-linear 3D slope tomography based on the concept of kinematic invariants provides a powerful tool for velocity model building as several iterations of residual move-out picking, prestack depth migration and velocity updates are avoided, unlike other approaches where residual depth errors have to be re-picked several times.