Source estimation for frequency-domain FWI with robust penalties

Source estimation is an essential component of full waveform inversion. In the standard frequency domain formulation, there is closed form solution for the the optimal source weights, which can thus be cheaply estimated on the fly. A growing body of work underscores the importance of robust modeling for data with large outliers or artifacts that are not captured by the forward model. Effectively, the least-squares penalty on the residual is replaced by a robust penalty, such as Huber, Hybrid `1-`2 or Student’s t. As we will demonstrate, it is essential to use the same robust penalty for source estimation. In this abstract, we present a general approach to robust waveform inversion with robust source estimation. In this general formulation, there is no closed form solution for the optimal source weights so we need to solve a scalar optimization problem to obtain these weights. We can efficiently solve this optimization problem with a Newton-like method in a few iterations. The computational cost involved is of the same order as the usual least-squares source estimation procedure. We show numerical examples illustrating robust source estimation and robust waveform inversion on synthetic data with outliers.

https://slim.gatech.edu/Publications/Public/Conferences/EAGE/2012/aravki...