Abstract:In this paper, we planned and improved the ant colony algorithm to quickly and accurately obtain the near-surface stratum structure. The ant colony algorithm is the simple algorithm, which has the advantages of fast operation efficiency and high precision. In this paper, the model data and the measured data indicated that the improved ant colony algorithm applied in Rayleigh wave inversion can achieve a better balance between the fast convergence rate and accuracy, and the solution has high credibility. This algorithm was divided into two ways, global search and local search, which can effectively avoid the generation of local optimal solution and thereby promoting the solution rapidly converge to the global optimum. Finally, the effectiveness and versatility of the improved ant colony algorithm in the inversion of near-surface shear wave velocity were verified using the artificial Rayleigh wave data and real observation data. Moreover, by comparing with the genetic algorithm, it was found that the improved ant colony algorithm has the advantages of high efficiency and accuracy.