Fast randomized full-waveform inversion with compressive sensing

Abstract

Wave-equation-based seismic inversion can be formulated as a nonlinear least-squares problem. The demand for higher-resolution models in more geologically complex areas drives the need to develop techniques that exploit the special structure of full-waveform inversion to reduce the computational burden and to regularize the inverse problem. We meet these goals by using ideas from compressive sensing and stochastic optimization to design a novel Gauss-Newton method, where the updates are computed from random subsets of the data via curvelet-domain sparsity promotion. Two different subset sampling strategies are considered: randomized source encoding, and drawing sequential shots firing at random source locations from marine data with missing near and far offsets. In both cases, we obtain excellent inversion results compared to conventional methods at reduced computational costs.