A dual formulation of wavefield reconstruction inversion for large-scale seismic inversion

Many of the seismic inversion techniques currently proposed that focus on robustness with respect to the background model choice are not apt to large-scale 3D applications, and the methods that are computationally feasible for industrial problems, such as full waveform inversion, are notoriously limited by convergence stagnation and require adequate starting models. We propose a novel solution that is both scalable and less sensitive to starting models or inaccurate parameters (such as anisotropy) that are typically kept fixed during inversion. It is based on a dual reformulation of the classical wavefield reconstruction inversion, whose empirical robustness with respect to these issues is well documented in the literature. While the classical version is not suited to 3D, as it leverages expensive frequency-domain solvers for the wave equation, our proposal allows the deployment of state-of-the-art time-domain finite-difference methods, and is potentially mature for industrial-scale problems.