A new take on FWI: wavefield reconstruction inversion

We discuss a recently proposed novel method for waveform inversion: Wavefield Reconstruction Inversion (WRI). As opposed to conventional FWI – which attempts to minimize the error between observed and predicted data obtained by solving a wave equation – WRI reconstructs a wave-field from the data and extracts a model-update from this wavefield by minimizing the wave-equation residual. The method does not require explicit computation of an adjoint wavefield as all the necessary information is contained in the reconstructed wavefield. We show how the corresponding model updates can be interpreted physically analogously to the conventional imaging-condition-based approach.