Efficient source wavefield reconstruction for full-waveform inversion

Abstract

Full-waveform inversion (FWI) is a useful tool for estimating the properties of subsurface media, but it has the disadvantage of incurring considerable computing costs. Therefore, we develop a method for reducing the computing memory requirement in the time domain of FWI that uses a new approach with the discrete cosine transform (DCT) and the Nyquist sampling theorem. Our method enables accurate reconstruction of a wavefield with several optimal DCT coefficients derived by considering the maximum wavenumber component of the virtual source wavefield and the maximum frequency of the source wavelet. Consequently, virtual source wavefields can be stored in a computer’s memory rather than on a disk. Our FWI algorithm is compared with existing compression methods that use DCT and wavelet transform in a numerical example. The results of this comparison demonstrate that our algorithm provides significantly improved computational efficiency.