A correlation-based misfit criterion for wave-equation traveltime tomography

The inference of subsurface medium parameters from seismic data can be posed as a PDE-constrained data-fitting procedure. This approach is successful in reconstructing medium perturbations that are in the order of the wavelength. In practice, the data lack low frequency content and this means that one needs a good initial guess of the slowly varying component of the medium. For a wrong starting model an iterative reconstruction procedure is likely to end up in a local minimum. We propose to use a different measure of the misfit that makes the optimization problem well-posed in terms of the slowly varying velocity structures. This procedure can be seen as a generalization of ray-based traveltime tomography. We discuss the theoretical underpinnings of the method and give some numerical examples.