A 3-D high resolution crosswell acoustic tomography system was designed and tested in a shallow water environment. This system makes use of a damped least-squared inversion technique and is used to construct compressional wave velocity images from measured travel time data. Use of singular value decomposition allowed checks of the linear inversion confirming the validity of the modeled environment. It is shown that when the ratio of width to depth of the cross section is about unity or smaller and the domain has not been overparametrized the inverted image model has sufficiently good figures of merit in resolution and variance to visualize small variations in the magnitude compressional velocity field.