Fast seismic inversion
The equal traveltime layer model of a horizontally layered medium with waves at normal incidence is used to solve the inverse problem (determination of the reflection coefficients and fundamental polynomials from the surface response) by an efficient algorithm using [Formula: see text] computations for N layers. The idea is to reduce the N‐layer problem to two similar problems of N/2 layers each plus additional computations of type B and C. Type B computes the data for the second problem from the result of the first and type C combines the results. For [Formula: see text] the reduction is carried out k times leading to N trivial one‐layer problems plus more computations of type B and C, which are polynomial multiplications or discrete convolutions. The improvement over the [Formula: see text] computations required by recursive methods comes from using the fast Fourier transform to perform the convolutions.