Near surface imaging is essential for geotechnics purpose. Characterization and identification of the first layers - between 0 and 10m - of the ground is necessary for many applications of national and regional development. Classical methods of imagery arouse a great interest as they are easy to use. In general, these numerical tools used in civil engineering have been first developped by seismic petroleum companies. The issue we are tackling comes to identifying the geometry of the foundations of very high voltage electric pylons using seismic imagery methods for french electricity transport and network. In particular, we assess the performances of the full waveform inversion and the reverse time migration. First, we explain the principle of these methods and then we implement them with a tool based on 2D modelisation which involves a reasonable computing time, contrary to 3D inversion carried out with today's means. Next, we show imagery results on synthetic and real data. Concerning, synthetic data, inversion makes it possible to identify the dimensions of the foundation as long as the velocity ratio between the foundation and the bedrock does not exceed 3. As to migration, it has good results with even much higher contrasts. Concerning real data, these two methods don't succeed in identifying the geometry of the foundation ; we inverted 3D synthetical data with our tool and show that the 3D property of data is prohibitive to 2D-inversion of real data with such an important 3D signature as the one we get on the foundation data.
