Effect of source and receiver radiation characteristics in subsurface prospecting within the distorted Born approximation

Abstract

Linear models are widely adopted in subsurface prospecting because of the advantages in terms of effectiveness and numerical efficiency. They make it possible to simplify the problem of inverse scattering and at the same time to obtain acceptable results in locating buried objects. In this paper, we deal with subsurface prospecting where a model linearization is performed via distorted Born approximation and considering a half‐space geometry in a two‐dimensional scalar problem within a multistatic/multiview configuration. In this realm, most inversion algorithms fail to take into account the radiation properties of both transmitting and receiving antennas. Our goal is thus twofold. First, we aim to provide an insight into the role played by the radiation properties of antennas on the quality of the reconstructed tomographic image of the investigated domain. This task is performed by first tackling the single‐frequency case in order to gain insight into the effect of the radiation pattern using simple arguments and then examining the multifrequency case. Numerical results confirm the theoretical expectation that the quality of the reconstruction gets worse for antennas with directive radiation patterns. Second, we numerically investigate the effects of inaccurate knowledge of the antenna pattern.