Ray tracing in Matlab

Ruiqing He

ABSTRACT
Ray tracing is an important procedure that is needed often in geophysics. Matlab
is an excellent scientific and engineering software tool. This report introduces a ray
tracer using Matlab. The ray tracer is so flexible that it can trace transmissions,
reflections and multiples easily in both 2D and 3D. Several ray tracing experiments
were conducted and the computed traveltimes were compared with the theoretical
travel times and those from eikonal ray tracer. Results showed this ray tracer to
be more capable than the eikonal ray tracer. This ray tracer has been successfully
used in both tomography and migration algorithms applied to both synthetic and
real data.

INTRODUCTION
Raytracing is so vital to geophysics that it has enjoyed a long history of research.
There are many ray tracing methods that can be categorized as initial value ray tracing (like the analytical method and shooting method) and boundary value ray tracing
(like the bending method and perturbation method). For application purposes, we
often need both travel times and ray paths, sometimes, reflections and multiples as
well.
To simplify the ray tracing problem, suppose we are given a digitized velocity
model, how can we find all of the first arrivals and their corresponding travel paths
to each node? Moser (1991), Fischer (1993) and others used a coarse grid to model
velocity while using a finer grid to model raypaths. Realizing a finer velocity model is
more important than a finer raypath model in ray tracing, I use the opposite approach
as Moser and Fischer did, i.e. the velocity grid is equal or finer than the raypath grid
(in this report I use equal grid). Without losing much accuracy, I assume that any
ray path consists of one or several line segments which have the nodes as end points.
A longer line segment is usually not necessary, so we can limit the line segment length
to several grid interval (also called the sub-ray tracing length). This means any ray
traveling from the source to a geophone must rest on nodes within the sub-ray tracing
length. With the above assumption, the method I am going to present is based on
the general Fermats principle, i.e. rays travel along minimum travel time paths.

RAYTRACING PROCESS
The proposed ray tracing process iteratively computes sub rays, searches for other
possible raypaths and then executes a decision. It has only four simple steps:
Step 1: starting from the original source, we first trace the straight line paths to
the nodes within the sub ray tracing length. All the visited nodes record the direct
travel time, and remember the source coordinates.
Step 2: then we can decide among these visited nodes, the one with the minimum
travel time must has the first arrival it records, and the ray comes from the source it
remembers.
Step 3: use the decided node as a secondary source and repeat the sub-ray tracing.
Any node that is visited twice is compared with its two travel times. Only the
minimum one is kept, and the remembered source is always the one with the minimum
travel time, no matter if it is the original source or a secondary source.
Step 4: repeat from step 2 until all interested nodes (or geophones) are decided.
This ray tracing process is so flexible that it makes reflection and multiple ray
tracing very easy and straightforward. Suppose we are required to trace the reflections
from one subsurface layer back to the ground, first we can apply flags to identify the
nodes beneath the reflector so that they are not to be traced. Do one ray tracing
until all the nodes on the reflector are decided. Stop here and keep only the travel
times on the reflector nodes while refreshing all other nodes travel times, (like an
exploding reflector, but they are triggered at their first arrival time). Do one more ray
tracing directly from step 2 in the above loop. So one reflection rayt racing appears
as two ray tracing procedures. A similar approach can be taken to trace multiples,
so that one first-order multiple ray tracing appears as 4 transmission ray tracing
procedures, and one second-order multiple ray tracing appears as 6 transmission ray
tracing procedures, and so on.
A similar strategy can be applied in 3D ray tracing.

EXAMPLES
I now present some ray tracing examples. The first example is a linear gradient
model. The grid size is 100x100 at 1m interval. The top layer velocity is 1000 m/s,
and the gradient gives a 10 m/s increase at every 1m depth. Theoretically we can
calculate the first arrivals on the ground. Figure 1 illustrates the errors of this ray
tracer and that of the eikonal ray tracer. From it we can see, the proposed ray tracer
has almost the same accuracy as the eikonal ray tracer which used a finer grid spacing.
Figure 2 displays the travel time field of the first experiment. On our AMD 2.2
GHZ computer, it takes less than 2 seconds. Figure 3 shows the ray paths to the four
model boundaries. The ray paths may cross each other and not enough curve. That
is because of numerical modeling errors. Figure 4 shows a ray tracing of reflections
in the same model and assuming there is a dipping reflector in the middle. Figure 5
shows a ray tracing of a multiple reflection. Only one multiple is shown although all
2

multiples are obtained simultaneously. Figure 6 shows a simple example of 3D ray

tracing. Figure 7 and Figure 9 shows the ray tracing result in a complex salt dome
model. The grid size is 150x645, and it takes about 20 seconds. Figure ?? shows the
CPU time used for tracing all grid points in different size models.
traveltime comparison
0.1
theory
this
eikonal
eikonal double grid

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time (s)

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0.05
40

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90

X (m)

Figure 1: Comparison of the traveltimes computed by the ray tracer and the eikonal
finite difference method.

CONCLUSION
In this report I proposed a flexible ray tracing method using Matlab that is versatile, accurate, and affortablly fast. In order to gain the same speed as the eikonal
ray tracer , we may need to implement it in C or Fortran. The obvious advantage of
this ray tracer is its capability to find ray paths and trace reflections and multiples.
This ray tracer has already been successfully used in our tomography and migration
algorithms for both synthetic and real data.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT
I thank the members of the 2002 University of Utah Tomography and Modeling/Migration (UTAM) Consortium for the financial support of this research.

traveltime field

(s)

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Figure 2: Travel time field in a linear gradient model.

Raypath
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Figure 3: Ray paths in a linear gradient model.

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Reflection raypath
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Figure 4: Reflection ray tracing in a dipping layer model with a velocity gradient.

Multiple raypath
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Figure 5: Same as the previous figure except multiple ray tracing.

3D ray tracing example

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Figure 6: 3D ray tracing example.

Salt dome velocity model

14000

Depth (feet)

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Travel time field

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Figure 7: Raytracing of traveltime field in a salt dome model.

Raypath

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Figure 8: Ray paths in the previous model.

CPU vs model size

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300x300
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CPU time (s)

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200x 300

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6
100x200
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100 x 100
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1

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3.5
AMD 2.2 GHZ computer

Figure 9: CPU time vs model size.

4.5

REFERENCES
Moser, T.j., 1991, Shortest path calculation of seismic rays, Geophysics, Vol 56,
Issue 1, 59-67.
Fischer, R., and Lees, J., 1993, Shortest path ray tracing with sparse graphs, Geophysics, Vol. 58, NO. 7, 987-996.
R. T. Langan, 1985, Tracing of rays through heterogeneous media: An accurate and
efficient procedure, Geophysics, Vol. 50, No. 9, 1456-1465.
Sun, H., 1999, 2-D and 3-D Shooting Ray Tracing: UTAM 1999 Annual Report,
401-412.