High Resolution Seismic Imaging of Very Shallow Highly Contrasted Structures

Imaging very shallow highly contrasted structures with seismic methods stands for a difficult task because of the interpretation complexity. In particular, body waves carry the main part of information about the structure while they are much less energetic than surface waves which dominate the data. In this study we assess the performances of two different imaging techniques for the characterization of concrete foundations. Relying on 2D-synthetic examples, we show Full Waveform Inversion behaves well on structures with low properties contrasts but fail to image realistic contrasts of concrete in soft sediments. We also apply elastic reverse time migration and conclude on its ability to characterize the geometry of the upper part of foundations.