Patent ID: 7092823

Claim:
A method of estimating, from data obtained by exploration of a zone of a heterogeneous medium, a model representative of a distribution, in the zone, of at least one physical quantity, the model being free of a presence of correlated noises that may be contained in the data, comprising: a) acquiring measurements giving information about physical characteristics of the zone by following a predetermined experimental protocol; b) specifying a noise modelling operator which associates, with a model of each physical quantity, synthetic data that constitute a response of the model, the measurements and the synthetic data belonging to a data space; c) selecting, for each correlated noise referenced by a subscript j ranging from 1 to J, a noise modelling operator which associates a correlated noise with a noise-generating function belonging to a predetermined space of the noise-generating functions (B j ); d) specifying a norm or of a semi-norm in the data space; e) specifying a semi-norm in the space of the noise-generating functions for which each noise modelling operator establishes substantially an isometric relation between the space of noise-generating functions and the data space; f) defining a cost function quantifying a difference between the measurements on one hand and a superposition of a model response and of the correlated noise associated with the noise-generating function on the other hand; and g) adjusting the model and of the noise-generating functions by minimizing the cost function, by means of an algorithmic method taking advantage of isometry of properties of the noise modelling operators.