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In order to compare and interpolate signals, we investigate a Riemannian geometry on the space of signals. The metric allows discontinuous signals and measures both horizontal (thus providing many benefits of the Wasserstein metric) and vertical deformations. Moreover, it allows for signed signals, which overcomes the main deficiency of optimal transportation-based metrics in signal processing. We characterize the metric properties of the space of signals and establish the regularity and stability of geodesics. Furthermore, we introduce an efficient numerical scheme to compute the geodesics and present several experiments which highlight the nature of the metric. 

Full-waveform inversion (FWI) is today a standard process for the inverse problem of seismic imaging. PDE-constrained optimization is used to determine unknown parameters in a wave equation that represent geophysical properties. The objective function measures the misfit between the observed data and the calculated synthetic data, and it has traditionally been the least-squares norm. In a sequence of papers, we introduced the Wasserstein metric from optimal transport as an alternative misfit function for mitigating the so-called cycle skipping, which is the trapping of the optimization process in local minima. In this paper, we first give a sharper theorem regarding the convexity of the Wasserstein metric as the objective function. We then focus on two new issues. One is the necessary normalization of turning seismic signals into probability measures such that the theory of optimal transport applies. The other, which is beyond cycle skipping, is the inversion for parameters below reflecting interfaces. For the first, we propose a class of normalizations and prove several favorable properties for this class. For the latter, we demonstrate that FWI using optimal transport can recover geophysical properties from domains where no seismic waves travel through. We finally illustrate these properties by the realistic application of imaging salt inclusions, which has been a significant challenge in exploration geophysics. 

State-of-the-art seismic imaging techniques treat inversion tasks such as full-waveform inversion (FWI) and least-squares reverse time migration (LSRTM) as partial differential equation-constrained optimization problems. Due to the large-scale nature, gradient-based optimization algorithms are preferred in practice to update the model iteratively. Higher-order methods converge in fewer iterations but often require higher computational costs, more line-search steps, and bigger memory storage. A balance among these aspects has to be considered. We have conducted an evaluation using Anderson acceleration (AA), a popular strategy to speed up the convergence of fixed-point iterations, to accelerate the steepest-descent algorithm, which we innovatively treat as a fixed-point iteration. Independent of the unknown parameter dimensionality, the computational cost of implementing the method can be reduced to an extremely low dimensional least-squares problem. The cost can be further reduced by a low-rank update. We determine the theoretical connections and the differences between AA and other well-known optimization methods such as L-BFGS and the restarted generalized minimal residual method and compare their computational cost and memory requirements. Numerical examples of FWI and LSRTM applied to the Marmousi benchmark demonstrate the acceleration effects of AA. Compared with the steepest-descent method, AA can achieve faster convergence and can provide competitive results with some quasi-Newton methods, making it an attractive optimization strategy for seismic inversion. 

Full waveform inversion (FWI) and least-squares reverse time migration (LSRTM) are popular imaging techniques that can be solved as PDE-constrained optimization problems. Due to the large-scale nature, gradient- and Hessian-based optimization algorithms are preferred in practice to find the optimizer iteratively. However, a balance between the evaluation cost and the rate of convergence needs to be considered. We propose the use of Anderson acceleration (AA), a popular strategy to speed up the convergence of fixed-point iterations, to accelerate a gradient descent method. We show that AA can achieve fast convergence that provides competitive results with some quasi-Newton methods. Independent of the dimensionality of the unknown parameters, the computational cost of implementing the method can be reduced to an extremely lowdimensional least-squares problem, which makes AA an attractive method for seismic inversion.