Wave-equation based inversion with the penalty method: adjoint-state versus wavefield-reconstruction inversion

In this paper we make a comparison between wave-equation based inversions based on the adjoint-state and penalty methods. While the adjoint-state method involves the minimization of a data-misfit and exact solutions of the wave-equation for the current velocity model, the penalty-method aims to first find a wavefield that jointly fits the data and honours the physics, in a least-squares sense. Given this reconstructed wavefield, which is a proxy for the true wavefield in the true model, we calculate updates for the velocity model. Aside from being less nonlinear–the acoustic wave equation is linear in the wavefield and model parameters but not in both–the inversion is carried out over a solution space that includes both the model and the wavefield. This larger search space allows the algortihm to circumnavigate local minima, very much in the same way as recently proposed model extentions try to acomplish. We include examples for low frequencies, where we compare full-waveform inversion results for both methods, for good and bad starting models, and for high frequencies where we compare reverse-time migration with linearized imaging based on wavefield-reconstruction inversion. The examples confirm the expected benefits of the proposed method.