Adaptive structure-based full-waveform inversion

Abstract

In simultaneous-shot full-waveform inversion (FWI), the re-started limited-memory Broyden-Fletcher-Goldfarb-Shanno (L-BFGS) algorithm can be used to suppress crosstalk, but crosstalk cannot be completely eliminated from the inversion results. To further solve the crosstalk problem caused by the interference among individual shots in simultaneous-shot FWI, adaptive structure-based smoothing is applied to the FWI with the restarted L-BFGS algorithm. Structure-based smoothing can mitigate the crosstalk by highlighting structure boundaries. To perform structure-based smoothing, an implicit anisotropic diffusion equation is solved. We carry out a multiscale inversion strategy. Because the FWI results in the low-frequency band contain less structural information and more crosstalk, structure-based smoothing is applied to the frequency band at frequencies higher than the peak frequency to prevent negative effects from the model structure in the low-frequency band. The estimated structural information is iteratively updated during the inversion process. Furthermore, structure-based smoothing is only added to the iterations with invariant encoding to reduce oversmoothing. The invariant encoding means that the shot encoding remains unchanged between iterations. Numerical experiments with an overthrust model indicate that the proposed adaptive structure-based FWI method can effectively suppress artifacts and provide a high-resolution inversion result, even when the encoded data are contaminated with strong noise. Another advantage of the adaptive structure-based FWI method is that no seismic migration needs to be performed, which makes it more efficient for real data.