Regularizing waveform inversion by projections onto intersections of convex sets

Common strategies to regularize waveform inversion (and other geophysical inverse problems) are adding quadratic penalty terms to the objective function or filtering the gradients used to update the model estimate. An example are penalties or filters to prevent/filter spurious high spatial frequency oscillations in the model while working with low frequency data. We present an alternative way of regularization, which works by projecting the model onto an intersection of convex sets, where each sets encodes certain desired model properties. This approach has certain theoretical and practical advantages over quadratic penalties or gradient filters. Some examples of useful convex sets in various challenging waveform inversion settings are shown on both real and synthetic data.

https://slim.gatech.edu/Publications/Public/Conferences/SINBAD/2015/Fall...