Migration velocity analysis and prestack migration of common-transmitter GPR data

The accuracy of a migration image of ground-penetrating radar (GPR) depends strongly on the accuracy of permittivity distribution determined from multioffset data. This paper proposes a migration velocity analysis method using a genetic algorithm (GA). The objective function is defined as the summation of normalized zero-delay cross correlation of all common-image point gathers. Under the assumptions that the media are blockwise and that the permittivity of each block can be expressed as a polynomial with limited terms, all coefficients of the permittivity function of each block, which maximize the objective function, are determined by migration velocity analysis method with GA. Prestack migration is performed by a reverse-time migration method based on Maxwell's equations solved by the finite-difference time-domain method with a perfectly matched layer absorbing boundary conditions. The migration velocity analysis method is applied to synthetic common-transmitter datasets to test the method. Then, the velocity analysis and prestack migration method are applied to field data. From the distribution of dielectric constant obtained from the field data, water content is derived, and the depth of a water aquifer is deduced from the water content distribution and a migration stack profile. Index Terms--Genetic algorithm (GA), ground-penetrating radar (GPR), migration velocity analysis, prestack migration, water content.