Inverse scattering problem: Back-projection, beamforming, and joint migration-inversion

There are three physical mechanisms in wave propagation (geometric spreading, absorption, and scattering) determining the energy and characteristics of the waveform. Understanding of wave scattering is definitely the hardest one and thereinafter bears the greatest potential to give rise the richest information about the internal structure of the target domain. In geophysics, the inverse scattering problem is conventionally solved by getting the material property distribution and the positions of the scatterers separately.