Recent advances in seismic inversion methods allow us to get high-resolution quantitative representations of mechanical parameters of the Earth. One of the most promising inversion method is the Full-waveform inversion (FWI) method which basically consists of an iterative data fitting process based on a local optimisation (Tarantola, 1984) and unlike conventional methods (e.g. first arrival times tomography) all the information available in the data can be handled. This method has been first applied to depth exploration (Virieux and Operto, 2009), but some authors already applied it to quantitatively image the near-surface. For example, G'elis (2005) succeeded to image cavities using synthetic data including surface waves arrivals. However one of the most important remaining challenges is the validation of the method with real field data that presents many difficulties: field data are often measured on not well-known media composed of high heterogeneity degree, important intrinsic attenuation and with prominent three dimensional effects. Considering all these difficulties, the necessity to have an experimental intermediate validation step becomes obvious. The aim is to reproduce the field experiments in a well-controlled environment at a smaller scale using a well-defined spacio-temporal scalling. The physical reduced scale modeling has several advantages compared to field-measurements: first the model physical parameters are well controlled, thus numerically repeatable; secondly, the great flexibility of the setup enables to experiment easily novel measurement configurations. This validation approach has already been first applied for geophysical imaging purposes by French (1974). Recently Bretaudeau (2010) designed an ultrasonic measurement bench called MUSC with several features that enable an excellent reproducibility of field measurements from the surface. For instance, a special attention has been paid to select a source that can be assimilated to a point source and the sensors displacements are controlled with an accuracy of 10 m. Using this experimental setup, Bretaudeau (2010) showed promising results on the inversion using the vertical component. Due to recent technological improvements (Blum et al., 2010), it is now possible to record the vertical and the horizontal components simultaneously using a new laser interferometer device which has been implemented in the MUSC measurement bench. In this context, the aim of the study presented here is to investigate numerically the benefits of the each component in the frame of the FWI method and to present the recent advances on measurements of both components on reduced physical scale models. First, the physical reduced scale model and its numerical representation will be described, then a numerical study will present the benefits provided by each component for velocities reconstructions and finally measurements of the vertical and horizontal components on the reduced physical scale model will be presented and compared to numerical simulations.