Finite Difference Implicit Structural Modeling of Geological Structures

International audience; We introduce a new method for implicit structural modeling. The main developments in this paper are the new regularization operators we propose by extending inherent properties of the classic one-dimensional discrete second derivative operator to higher dimensions. The proposed regularization operators dis-cretize naturally on the Cartesian grid using finite differences, owing to the highly symmetric nature of the Cartesian grid. Furthermore, the proposed regulariza-tion operators do not require any special treatment on boundary nodes, and their generalization to higher dimensions is straightforward. As a result, the proposed method has the advantage of being simple to implement. Numerical examples show that the proposed method is robust and numerically efficient.