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We introduce a novel approach to waveform inversion based on a data-driven reduced order model (ROM) of the wave operator. The presentation is for the acoustic wave equation, but the approach can be extended to elastic or electromagnetic waves. The data are time resolved measurements of the pressure wave gathered by an acquisition system that probes the unknown medium with pulses and measures the generated waves. We propose to solve the inverse problem of velocity estimation by minimizing the square misfit between the ROM computed from the recorded data and the ROM computed from the modeled data, at the current guess of the velocity. We give a step by step computation of the ROM, which depends nonlinearly on the data and yet can be obtained from them in a noniterative fashion, using efficient methods from linear algebra. We also explain how to make the ROM robust to data inaccuracy. The ROM computation requires the full array response matrix gathered with colocated sources and receivers. However, we find that the computation can deal with an approximation of this matrix, obtained from towed-streamer data using interpolation and reciprocity on-the-fly. Although the full-waveform inversion approach of nonlinear least-squares data fitting is challenging without low-frequency information, due to multiple minima of the data fit objective function, we find that the ROM misfit objective function has better behavior, even for a poor initial guess. We also find by explicit computation of the objective functions in a simple setting that the ROM misfit objective function has convexity properties, whereas the least-squares data fit objective function displays multiple local minima.
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New likelihood functions and level-set prior for Bayesian full-waveform inversion
Seismic full-waveform inversion aims to reconstruct subsurface medium parameters from recorded seismic data. It is solved as a constrained optimization problem in the deterministic approach. Many different objective functions have been proposed to tackle the nonconvexity that originated from the cycle-skipping issues. The analogy between objective functions in the deterministic inversion and likelihood functions in Bayesian inversion motivates us to analyze the noise model each objective function accounts for under the Bayesian inference setting. We also show the existence and wellposedness of their corresponding posterior measures. In particular, the theorem shows that theWasserstein-type likelihood offers better stability with respect to the noise in the recorded data. Together with an application of the level-set prior, we demonstrate by numerical examples the successful reconstruction from Bayesian full-waveform inversion under the proper choices of the likelihood function and the prior distribution.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1913129
- PAR ID:
- 10252870
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- SEG Technical Program Expanded Abstracts 2020
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 825 to 829
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1190/segam2020-3428223.1
