Source estimation for wavefield-reconstruction inversion

Source estimation is essential to all the wave-equation-based seismic inversions, including full-waveform inversion and the recently proposed wavefield-reconstruction inversion. When the source estimation is inaccurate, errors will propagate into the predicted data and introduce additional data misfit. As a consequence, inversion results that minimize this data misfit may become erroneous. To mitigate the errors introduced by the incorrect and pre-estimated sources, an embedded procedure that updates sources along with medium parameters is necessary for the inversion. So far, such a procedure is still missing in the context of wavefield-reconstruction inversion, a method that is, in many situations, less prone to local minima related to the so-called cycle skipping, compared to full-waveform inversion through exact data-fitting. While wavefield-reconstruction inversion indeed helps to mitigate issues related to cycle skipping by extending the search space with wavefields as auxiliary variables, it relies on having access to the correct source functions. In this paper, we remove the requirement of having the accurate source functions by proposing a source estimation technique specifically designed for wavefield-reconstruction inversion. To achieve this task, we consider the source functions as unknown variables and arrive at an objective function that depends on the medium parameters, wavefields, and source functions. During each iteration, we apply the so-called variable projection method to simultaneously project out the source functions and wavefields. After the projection, we obtain a reduced objective function that only depends on the medium parameters and invert for the unknown medium parameters by minimizing this reduced objective. Numerical experiments illustrate that this approach can produce accurate estimates of the unknown medium parameters without any prior information of the source functions.