Direct Waveform Inversion: a New Recursive Scheme

Abstract:

The goal of the full-waveform inversion (FWI) is to find an Earth’s model such that the synthetic waveforms computed using the model fit the observed ones. In practice, such a model is found in the context of the perturbation approach in an iterative fashion. Specifically, to find such a model, one starts from an initial global velocity model and perform model updating iteratively based on the Frechet derivative or single scattering by adjoint methods to minimize some cost function. However, this process often leads to local minima for the nonlinear cost function in the optimization and slow or no convergence when the starting model is far from the true model.

To solve for the initial-model dependence and the convergence issue, we show a new direct waveform inversion (DWI) idea to directly invert the waveform data recursively by explicitly enforcing the causality principle. The DWI offers the advantage of assuming no global initial model and no iteration is needed for the model updating. Starting from the source-receiver region, the DWI builds the model outward recursively by fitting the earliest part of the reflection waveforms and the DWI process is always convergent. The DWI combines seismic imaging and velocity model building into one single process and this is in contrast to many industrial applications where seismic imaging/migration and velocity modeling building are done alternatively. The DWI idea is applicable to one-, two-, and three-dimensional spaces. We show numerical examples to support our idea using full waveform data including both free-surface and inter-bed multiples. Using reflection seismic data, we show that the DWI can invert for both velocity and density, separately.

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