An all-at-once approach to full waveform inversion in the viscoelastic regime

Full waveform seismic inversion (FWI) in the viscoelastic regime entails the task of identifying parameters in the viscoelastic wave equation from partial waveform measurements. Traditionally, one frames this nonlinear problem as an operator equation for the parameter‐to‐state map. Alternatively, in an all‐at‐once approach, one augments the nonlinear operator by the viscoelastic wave equation as an additional component and considers the states as additional variables. Hence, parameters and states are sought for simultaneously. In this article, we give a mathematically rigorous all‐at‐once version of FWI in a functional analytical formulation. Further, the corresponding nonlinear map is shown to be Fréchet differentiable, and the adjoint operator of the Fréchet derivative is given in an explicit way suitable for implementation in a Newton‐type/gradient‐based regularization scheme

Improved full-waveform inversion for seismic data in the presence of noise based on the K-support norm

Full-waveform inversion (FWI) is known as a seismic data processing method that achieves high-resolution imaging. In the inversion part of the method that brings high resolution in finding a convergence point in the model space, a local numerical optimization algorithm minimizes the objective function based on the norm using the least-square form. Since the norm is sensitive to outliers and noise, the method may often lead to inaccurate imaging results. Thus, a new regulation form with a more practical relaxation form is proposed to solve the overfitting drawback caused by the use of the norm,, namely the K-support norm, which has the form of more reasonable and tighter constraints. In contrast to the least-square method that minimizes the norm, our K-support constraints combine the and the norms. Then, a quadratic penalty method is adopted to linearize the non-linear problem to lighten the computational load. This paper introduces the concept of the K-support norm and integrates this scheme with the quadratic penalty problem to improve the convergence and robustness against background noise. In the numerical example, two synthetic models are tested to clarify the effectiveness of the K-support norm by comparison to the conventional norm with noisy data set. Experimental results indicate that the modified FWI based on the new regularization form effectively improves inversion accuracy and stability, which significantly enhances the lateral resolution of depth inversion even with data with a low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR).Comment: 54 pages, 21 figure

Inexact Augmented Lagrangian Method-Based Full-waveform Inversion with Randomized Singular Value Decomposition

Full Waveform Inversion (FWI) is a modeling algorithm used for seismic data processing and subsurface structure inversion. Theoretically, the main advantage of FWI is its ability to obtain useful subsurface structure information, such as velocity and density, from complex seismic data through inversion simulation. However, under complex conditions, FWI is difficult to achieve high-resolution imaging results, and most of the cases are due to random noise, initial model, or inversion parameters and so on. Therefore, we consider an effective image processing and dimension reduction tool, randomized singular value decomposition (rSVD) - weighted truncated nuclear norm regularization (WTNNR), for embedding FWI to achieve high-resolution imaging results. This algorithm obtains a truncated matrix approximating the original matrix by reducing the rank of the velocity increment matrix, thus achieving the truncation of noisy data, with the truncation range controlled by WTNNR. Subsequently, we employ an inexact augmented Lagrangian method (iALM) algorithm in the optimization to compress the solution space range, thus relaxing the dependence of FWI and rSVD-WTNNR on the initial model and accelerating the convergence rate of the objective function. We tested on two sets of synthetic data, and the results show that compared with traditional FWI, our method can more effectively suppress the impact of random noise, thus obtaining higher resolution and more accurate subsurface model information. Meanwhile, due to the introduction of iALM, our method also significantly improves the convergence rate. This work indicates that the combination of rSVD-WTNNR and FWI is an effective imaging strategy which can help to solve the challenges faced by traditional FWI.Comment: 55 Pages, 21 Figure

Compound Regularization of Full-Waveform Inversion for Imaging Piecewise Media

International audienceFull waveform inversion (FWI) is an iterative nonlinear waveform matching procedure, which seeks to reconstruct unknown model parameters from partial waveform measurements. The nonlinear and ill-posed nature of FWI requires sophisticated regularization techniques to solve it. In most applications, the model parameters may be described by physical properties (e.g., wave speeds, density, attenuation, anisotropy) which are piecewise functions of space. Compound regularizations are thus beneficial to capture these different functions by FWI. We consider different implementations of compound regularizations in the wavefield reconstruction inversion (WRI) method, a formulation of FWI that extends its search space and prevents the socalled cycle skipping pathology. Our hybrid regularizations rely on Tikhonov and total variation (TV) functionals, from which we build two classes of hybrid regularizers: the first class is simply obtained by a convex combination (CC) of the two functionals, while the second relies on their infimal convolution (IC). In the former class, the model parameters are required to simultaneously satisfy different priors, while in the latter the model is broken into its basic components, each satisfying a distinct prior (e.g. smooth, piecewise constant, piecewise linear). We implement these compound regularizations in WRI using the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM). Then, we assess our regularized WRI for seismic imaging applications. Using a wide range of subsurface models, we conclude that the compound regularizer based on IC leads to the lowest error in the parameter reconstruction compared to that obtained with the CC counterpart and the Tikhonov and TV regularizers when used independently