Is Image-warping a Robust Tool for Image Domain Tomography?

Summary Migration Velocity Analysis in the subsurface-domain measures velocity errors via (extended) imagedomain residuals with respect to an ideal reference image and then updates the velocity model in order to minimise those residuals. Because of the similarity between images with similar extension parameter (shot number, offset, incidence angle, etc.), image-warping presents a robust approach to compute image residuals in different subsurface domains. However, since similarity measures cannot in general distinguish between signal and coherent noise, kinematic artefacts that contaminate the migrated images in certain extended domains can lead to strong and spurious events in the image perturbations and hinder the robustness of the tomographic inversion.