Weighted Diffraction-Based Migration Velocity Analysis of Common-Offset GPR Reflection Data

Migration focusing analysis of diffractions is an increasingly important tool for estimating the large-scale subsurface velocity structure from surface-based common-offset ground-penetrating radar (GPR) reflection data. We present a weighting strategy, whose aim is to improve the reliability of estimations of the root-mean-square (rms) velocity obtained using a local semblance focusing measure. In this regard, we increase the resolution of the inferred semblance spectra through a weighting function that varies in accordance with the sensitivity of a diffraction curve to changes in velocity. The weighting function is derived from coherency and slope attributes of the diffracted wavefield components. To demonstrate the viability of our proposed method, we consider its application in two synthetic test cases and one field GPR dataset. Compared with conventional unweighted local semblance spectra, their weighted counterparts allow for a significantly increased resolution and correspondingly reduced picking uncertainty.