A denoising formulation of full-waveform inversion

We propose a wave-equation-based subsurface inversion method that in many cases is more robust than the conventional Full-Waveform Inversion. The new formulation is written in a denoising form that allows the synthetic data to match the observed ones up to a small error. Compared to the Full-Waveform Inversion, our method treats the noise arising from the data measuring/recording process and that from the synthetic modelling process separately. Comparing to the Wavefields Reconstruction Inversion, the new formulation mitigates the difficulty of choosing the penalty parameter λ. To solve the proposed optimization problem, we develop an efficient frequency domain algorithm that alternatively updates the model and the data. Numerical experiments confirm strong stability of the proposed method by comparisons between the results of our algorithm with that from both plain FWI and a weighted formulation of the FWI.

https://slim.gatech.edu/Publications/Public/Conferences/SEG/2017/wang201...