Tomographic full waveform inversion: Practical and computationally feasible approach

Tomographic full waveform inversion: Practical and computationally feasible approach

Ali Almomin and Biondo Biondi

Abstract:

We provide an alternative formulation to tomographic full-waveform inversion which computes the backscattering and the forward scattering components of the model separately. To maintain high resolution results of tomographic full-waveform inversion, the two components of the gradient are mixed based on a Fourier domain scale separation. This formulation is based on the Born approximation where the medium parameters are broken into a long wavelength and short wavelength components. This approximation has an underlying assumption that the data contain primaries only without multiples. The results of the Marmousi model show that convergence is possible even with large errors in the initial model that would have prevented convergence to conventional full-waveform inversion.