Seismic imaging with generalized Radon transforms: stability of the Bolker condition

Generalized Radon transforms are Fourier integral operators which are used, for instance, as imaging models in geophysical exploration. They appear naturally when linearizing about a known background compression wave speed. In this work we first consider a linearly increasing background velocity in two spatial dimensions. We verify the Bolker condition for the zero-offset scanning geometry and provide meaningful arguments for it to hold even if the common offset is positive. Based on this result we suggest an imaging operator for which we calculate the top order symbol in the zero-offset case to study how it maps singularities. Second, to support the usage of background models obtained from linear regression we present a stability result for the Bolker condition under perturbations of the background velocity and of the offset.