Fast and reliability-aware seismic imaging with conditional normalizing flows

The posterior probability distribution provides a comprehensive description of the solution in ill-posed inverse problems. Sampling from the posterior distribution in the context of seismic imaging is challenged by the high-dimensionality of the unknown and the expensive-to-evaluate forward operator. These challenges limit the applicability of Markov Chain sampling methods due to the costs associated with the forward operator. Moreover, explicitly choosing a prior distribution that captures the true heterogeneity exhibited by the Earth's subsurface further complicates casting seismic imaging into a Bayesian framework. To handle this situation and to assess uncertainty, we propose a data-driven variational inference approach based on conditional normalizing flows (NFs). The proposed scheme leverages existing data, which are in the form of low- and high-fidelity migrated image pairs, to train a conditional NF capable of characterizing the posterior distribution. After training, the NF can be used to sample from the posterior distribution associated with a previously unseen seismic survey, which is in some sense close, e.g., data from a neighboring survey area. In our numerical example, we obtain high-fidelity images from the Parihaka dataset and low-fidelity images are derived from these images through the process of demigration, followed by adding band-limited noise and migration. During inference, given shot records from a new neighboring seismic survey, we first compute the reverse-time migration image. Next, by feeding this low-fidelity migrated image to the NF we gain access to samples from the posterior distribution virtually for free. We use these samples to compute a high-fidelity image including a first assessment of the image's reliability.