Background-Conditioned Diffusion Inversion for Seismic Velocity Models

Accurate seismic imaging and velocity estimation are important for subsurface characterization, yet conventional full-waveform inversion remains computationally expensive and highly sensitive to initial velocity models. To address these challenges, we propose a simulation-based inference framework using conditional elucidated diffusion models for posterior velocity-model sampling. Our approach integrates both horizontal and vertical subsurface-offset common-image gathers to capture a wider range of reflector geometries, from gently dipping to steeply inclined layers. We further condition the model on the background-velocity field to improve generalization across diverse geological settings. Evaluations on the SEAM dataset, which includes complex salt geometries, demonstrate that this conditioning substantially improves performance, increasing SSIM from 0.717 to 0.733 and reducing RMSE from 0.381 km/s to 0.274 km/s. Uncertainty analysis further shows enhanced calibration, lowering uncertainty calibration error from 6.68 km/s to 3.91 km/s. These results confirm that our diffusion-based simulation framework enables robust seismic inversion with reliable uncertainty quantification.