Patent ID: 8255166

Claim:
A method of computer implemented constructing an image representative of a heterogeneous medium by joint inversion of seismic data expressed in a first time scale t 0 and a second time scale t 1 , comprising: carrying out sequential inversion of the seismic data in order to determine a first estimation of at least one combination of physical quantities from the seismic data expressed in the first time scale and at least a second estimation of the at least one combination from the seismic data expressed in the second time scale; defining a scale factor allowing synthetic data described in the first time scale t 0 to be expressed in the second time scale t 1 , by a differential equation relating, by a function, traveltime variations of a seismic wave ∂ t 1 ⁡ ( t 0 ) ∂ t 0 to the combinations of physical quantities, and by determining the scale factor by solving the differential equation by a minimization method wherein the difference between ∂ t 1 ⁡ ( t 0 ) ∂ t 0 and the function is minimized; and constructing the image representative of a heterogeneous medium by carrying out the joint inversion wherein a cost function using the scale factor is minimized to evaluate a difference between synthetic data expressed in the first time scale and the seismic data expressed in the second time scale.