Paper Summary
Tomography is commonly used to build the anisotropic model for depth imaging, which requires human intervention for residual picking and quality control. In addition, tomography is typically implemented with a gradient descent optimization that can lead to a local extremum. We present an automatic inversion approach to estimating Thomsen parameters ? and ? when vertical velocity is known from well data with the assumption of 1-D vertical transverse isotropy (VTI).It employs the very fast simulated annealing as the global optimization algorithm and a fast model based moveout technique for re-migration/de-migration engine. We demonstrate the automatic inversion with both synthetic and field data.