Solution of an acoustic transmission inverse problem by extended inversion

Abstract

Abstract Study of a simple single-trace transmission example shows how an extended source formulation of full-waveform inversion can produce an optimization problem without spurious local minima (‘cycle skipping’), hence efficiently solvable via Newton-like local optimization methods. The data consist of a single trace extracted from a causal pressure field, propagating in a homogeneous fluid according to linear acoustics, and recorded at a given distance from a transient point energy source. The source intensity (‘wavelet’) is presumed quasi-impulsive, with zero energy for time lags greater than a specified maximum lag. The inverse problem is: from the recorded trace, recover both the sound velocity or slowness and source wavelet with specified support, so that the data is fit with prescribed RMS relative error. The least-squares objective function has multiple large residual minimizers. The extended inverse problem permits source energy to spread in time, and replaces the maximum lag constraint by a weighted quadratic penalty. A companion paper shows that for proper choice of weight operator, any stationary point of the extended objective produces a good approximation of the global minimizer of the least squares objective, with slowness error bounded by a multiple of the maximum lag and the assumed noise level. This paper summarizes the theory developed in the companion paper and presents numerical experiments demonstrating the accuracy of the predictions in concrete instances. We also show how to dynamically adjust the penalty scale during iterative optimization to improve the accuracy of the slowness estimate.