Università di Ferrara, Dipartimento di Scienze della Terra, Via Saragat 1, 4100 Ferrara, Italy

Traveltime tomography is a very effective tool to reconstruct acoustic, seismic or electromagnetic wave speed distribution. To infer the velocity image of the medium from the measurements of first arrivals is a typical example of ill-posed problem. In the framework of Tikhonov regularization theory, in order to replace an ill-posed problem by a well-posed one and to get a unique and stable solution, a stabilizing functional (stabilizer) has to be introduced. The stabilizer selects the desired solution from a class of solutions with a specific physical and/or geometrical property; e.g., the existence of sharp boundaries separating media with different petrophysical parameters. Usually stabilizers based on maximum smoothness criteria are used during the inversion process; in these cases the solutions provide smooth images which, in many situations, do not describe the examined objects properly. Recently a new algorithm of direct minimization of the Tikhonov parametric functional with minimum support stabilizer has been introduced; it produces clear and focused images of targets with sharp boundaries. In this research we apply this new technique to real radar tomographic data and we compare the obtained result with the solution generated by the more traditional minimum norm stabilizer.

We present an algorithm for focusing inversion of electrical resistivity tomography (ERT) data. ERT is a typical example of ill-posed problem. Regularization is the most common way to face this kind of problems; it basically consists in using a priori information about targets to reduce the ambiguity and the instability of the solution. By using the minimum gradient support (MGS) stabilizing functional, we introduce the following geometrical prior information in the reconstruction process: anomalies have sharp boundaries. The presented work is embedded in a project (L.A.R.A.) which aims at the estimation of hydrogeological properties from geophysical investigations. L.A.R.A. facilities include a simulation tank (4 m x 8 m x 1.35 m); 160 electrodes are located all around the tank and used for 3-D ERT. Because of the large number of electrodes and their dimensions, it is important to model their effect in order to correctly evaluate the electrical system response. The forward modelling in the presented algorithm is based on the so-called complete electrode model that takes into account the presence of the electrodes and their contact impedances. In this paper, we compare the results obtained with different regularizing functionals applied on a synthetic model.